


Small Sacrifices

by TheLionInMyBed



Series: Raised By Wolves [8]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Cover Art, Elves, Fantasy, Gods, Horror, M/M, Mystery, Poor Life Choices, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-15 18:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5795248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A child is missing. It’s not the first time it has happened. It probably won’t be the last and besides, the town of Milcom has bigger problems. Cut off from the world by snow and scavengers, its people are starving and no one, not the local lord, not their gods, seems to care. Enter Imrael Sovelin, trainee doctor and professional meddler, who is determined to save them, and his sometimes guide, sometimes friend Khazri Il'harren who has more pressing concerns; what really happened to Wyne Orendason? What lies at the bottom of Milcom Lake? And why is this all so horribly familiar?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Banner art by [Pargile](http://pargile.tumblr.com/), Chapter art by [Callum Stannard](http://callumstannard.com/)!

_The air was warm and sticky as the blood on the sands below. It drew flies and Khazri shook his head to shoo them away, setting the jade beads in his hair chattering like teeth. He liked the sound and did it again, kept doing it until his uncle stilled him with a glare._

_The priests were giving speeches. They’d been doing it for as long as the woman on the arena floor had been dying. Later there would be feasts, music and dancing but now they must sit still in the heat and wait for the ceremony to be done with. His festival clothes were heavy and itchy and too big - they’d belonged to one of his cousins once - and the woman kept making noises and he wasn’t sure he’d ever been so bored._

_“They were both so valiant,” said Chanali, his cousin. She was nine, which was three years older than him and seemed impossibly mature._

_“It was a fucking farce,” said her sister. Cierza was twenty and made a point of being childish._

_She was right though. The fight had been a long one and ugly. Two women circling and circling, taking each other apart by inches. The winner had lost the fingers on her sword hand and had spent half the fight running until her leg had been hacked half off, forcing her to crawl. But she’d cut her opponent open so that her guts had spilled out to drag behind her as she staggered about the arena. From there it had just been a matter of waiting. And waiting._

_They’d had to carry the winner from the field. Marath, of battle and blood, of glorious conquest, could hardly be satisfied with such a sacrifice._

_Khazri flicked his ears at the flies, careful to keep his head still. It didn’t really help._

_Below them the loser twitched. Died. A priest bent over to check for a pulse, stood and raised her bloody hands to the crowd. There were some half-hearted cheers but people were already getting up to leave._

_“It’s not fair,” said Chanali. “They ought to appreciate what she did for them.”_

_“Long as the Gods do, Sissy, that’s all that matters.” Cierza stood and stretched, her back cracking ostentatiously._

_Four novices draped a shroud over the corpse and lifted it onto their shoulders while slaves threw clean white sand over the blood that stained the arena floor._

_“A shame,” said the captain of their guard. “They said she was very promising.”_

_“She made her choice,” said Khamsin Il’harren. His mother stood. “With me, boy.”_

_Khazri followed._

***

The winter wind howled through the woods like a hound on a trail, kicking up flurries in its wake and trying to snatch Khazri’s hood from his head. He pulled it down more firmly, the rabbit fur lining tickling his cheeks.

“Do you have an emotional attachment to that thing?” Imrael asked, his voice muffled by the scarf wrapped around his face. Imrael hated the cold even more than Khazri did, which took quite a lot of hating. “I can’t think why else you’d wear it.”

“It’s warm,” he said, sticking his hands deeper into his pockets.

“It’s mangy.”

“No worse than my hair then.”

“Your hair is fine. It would be better than fine - stunning even - if you just got it cut properly and stopped hiding it under that abomination,” Imrael said unconvincingly. “When we get to a town, we’re buying you a new cloak.”

“No we’re not.”

“You can’t get all your outfits from picking over corpses. It leads to a very limited wardrobe.”

“They aren’t using them anymore,” Khazri said reasonably. “It’s practical.”

“There’s more to life than ‘practical’. We’re going to get you clothes that fit, clothes in colours that aren’t grey and brown. Even, dare I say it, clothes that aren’t suspiciously bloodstained. You’re going to look amazing.”

Khazri made an inarticulate noise of distress and the dogs, who’d outpaced them to sniff at some deer tracks, looked back questioningly.

“Oh come on. I’m cold, I’m tired, my feet hurt, and Jeff left half a frog in my bedroll this morning. Give me something to look forwards to.”

_“You should make more of an effort,” said Tehaneth, his cousin, flicking through swatches of silk. He held one up contemplatively. “Perhaps the cobalt? Even a bastard can make a good match if he’s pretty enough.”_

_“I don’t know why you’re telling him that,” said his uncle. “Don’t be cruel.”_

“You can shop all you want,” Khazri said sharply. “I don’t care what I look like.”

Imrael rolled his dark eyes, unoffended as ever by Khazri’s touchiness. “You’re hopeless.” He leant over and snatched Khazri’s hood off to fluff his hair. Foolish because it brought him close enough for Khazri to retaliate and steal his hat. It lead to a brief game of keepaway, Imrael advantaged by his height but no match for Khazri’s superior athleticism and ungentlemanly willingness to kick his legs out from under him. The dogs joined in, creating a flailing tangle of fur and snow and mittens, until Jeff managed to grab the hat and made a triumphant getaway, Beryl snapping at his heels.

There was snow in Imrael’s hair, and his cheeks were flushed with cold as Khazri hauled him out of the snowbank they’d fallen into.

“Am I ever getting that back?” he asked breathlessly.

“He’s going to eat it. Just remember, you started-” Khazri stopped, ears pricking to catch a sound on the edge of hearing. “Someone’s coming,” he said.

If he’d been alone he would have vanished into the undergrowth, but they’d left tracks and stealth was an alien concept to Imrael. Indeed, he was still standing in the road, making no effort to conceal himself.

“Good,” he said brightly. “That must mean we’re close to town.”

“It could be anyone. Anything.” But Khazri stayed on the path with him. Imrael gave him a look as he unwrapped and strung his bow so he didn’t nock an arrow, which he felt was a reasonable compromise. He whistled for the dogs, hoping Beryl at least would return to flank whatever came.

The baying of hounds reached them first, and the crunch of many feet on snow, not marching Khazri noted, nor attempting to be stealthy. A long line of women - and men for this was a less civilized place than Zalach’ann - spread out through the woods around them. Their dogs must have picked up Jeff and Beryl’s scent, for the barking became wilder the closer they got and the people began to converge on the path where he and Imrael stood.

“Hail,” Imrael called when they were close enough to hear him over the snarling. “Well met. This is the road for Milcom, yes?”

The people - half a dozen humans - were unsmiling and uncharmed. “Drop your weapon and raise your hands,” said a tall, round-faced young woman with a fur cloak and a crossbow pointed at Imrael’s head. She held it steadily but with an awkwardness that suggested she hasn’t used it often. The other women and men with her were unarmoured, and those few that were armed carried staves and fishing spears. They hadn’t come looking for a fight so why the crossbow?

Kharzi laid down his own weapon while Imrael beamed like he hadn’t even noticed the threat in the woman’s tone. “How far are we from town? We were hoping to reach it before nightfall,” he said, while Khazri noted that the woman on the far left favoured her left leg, and the man with the scythe’s hands were shaking.

“Identify yourselves,” said the tall woman, ignoring the question.

“I’m Imrael Sovelin and this is Khazri,” Imrael said calmly. “We’re come from Dawnwood at the behest of Lord Arroway.” More accurately Imrael came at her Ladyship’s behest, being her friend and classmate at the University of Ferris. Khazri came at Imrael’s because he’d needed a guide. He should have refused but, Gods help him, he liked Imrael and Imrael against all common sense seemed determined to like him.

But then Imrael had no common sense to speak of. Khazri was forever telling him not to give their real names and Imrael was forever forgetting. He concealed his annoyance and bowed politely, using the motion as cover to palm a knife.

“Can you prove that?” the woman said, not lowering her weapon. He couldn’t kill her before she fired, but he doubted she had the skill to hit a moving target. If he knocked Imrael aside and charged, she’d never get a second shot.

“I have a writ bearing her ladyship’s seal,” Imrael said, slowly reaching for his pack. “If you’ll give me a moment to fish it out…”

“Place the bag on the floor and step away,” she said, finger twitching against the trigger. The women with her weren’t soldiers and she was all that held them together. He could see it in the trembling knees and brows sheened with frozen sweat. Those few that didn’t break and run in the wake of her death he might deal with. His mother hadn’t taught him to fight personally but she was a pragmatic woman and had seen the need for him to learn. Not a sword, that wouldn’t have been proper, but he could do a lot of damage with a knife.

Imrael shrugged and unshouldered the pack, then took a couple of unhurried steps back from it. His expression - amiable and vaguely curious - hadn’t changed.

The bowwoman nodded to one of her companions, a plain young man with blonde stubble, sparse as a winter field. He shuffled forwards, prey-skittish, and tugged the bag open, vials and surgical tools clinking as he picked through it.

“Could you be more careful with those please?” Imrael asked, sounding concerned for the first time. “Some of them are fragile.” The boy grunted and pulled out Keira’s letter then backed away from them with obvious relief. His commander took it and struggled to keep her crossbow trained on them one handed while stealing awkward glances at the paper. Her brow furrowed and Khazri wondered uncharitably if she knew how to read or if she was just looking at the gilt and pretty seals.

Either way it must have satisfied her, for she lowered her weapon and nodded to the others to stand down. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” she said brusquely. “We don’t often see the…the fair folk in these parts and we have cause to-” she trailed off with an embarrassed cough. “I’m Esma, Eyota’s daughter, Headwoman of Milcom. I wish I could offer a better welcome to her Ladyship’s envoys, but you’ve come in dark times. Have you seen a child upon the road? A boy of seven. Skinny and dark haired, with a twisted arm.”

“We haven’t seen a soul since Lymebridge and that was two days ago,” Imrael said, glancing to Khazri for confirmation. “Certainly no children. We’d be happy to assist you in the search, of course. How long has he been missing?” The cold and his sore feet had evidently been forgotten in the face of an opportunity for heroism.

“Since nightfall of the day before yesterday.”

“A long time to be out in this weather,” said Imrael and Khazri watched Esma’s smooth face. She at least was looking for a body and not a child, he thought. Of the others, most were equally resigned, especially the older humans. One woman’s face still held a sharp, brittle optimism that was hard to look upon and he took her for the mother.

A missing child explained their greeting. The elves of the deep woods stole babies and musicians, poets and dreamers. They brought the fair and the lost and the mad to dance with them in faery glades beneath stars and swaying branches. Or so the stories went, though Khazri put little stock in them. His own people, from the dark under the mountains, left no such lies to salve the pain, did not pretend they took their slaves for kindness’ sake.

It was a faint, cruel hope that the boy had been spirited away, but something to cling to when all else was lost. Still, it did him and Imrael no favours. Even now the townspeople looked at them sidelong and whispered.

Imrael pretended not to notice, or perhaps he really didn’t. “Have your dogs picked up a trail?” he asked.

“The cold’s killed the scent,” said a short, stocky woman who, from the hound embroidered upon her fur parka, must be the master of the dogs that circled them. They were better groomed and fed than many of the humans in the party but that amounted to little enough. They were brown and black and tan, with ears that flopped or pricked, though all had thick coats and sharp white teeth. Something - the smell of Jeff and Beryl or perhaps the chemicals in Imrael’s bag - kept them from coming too close.

“Could the wolves manage?” Imrael whispered to him, barely audible over the barking.

Khazri shrugged one-shouldered and whistled. They’d been waiting in the sparse winter underbrush, thick grey coats making them invisible against the slush on the ground. The woman’s dogs went mad at the sight of them, snarling and struggling against their handlers - just not quite hard enough to break away and risk a fight. Beryl ignored them entirely and came to sit beside him with a faintly superior air. Jeff made to approach the hounds, probably out of benevolent curiosity, but Khazri caught him by the ruff and pulled him back. A dogfight was the last thing they needed with the tension so close to diffused.

“My friend’s...wolfhounds might be able to help, if you have something of the boy’s? Ah, very good. If you’d just give it to Khazri, thank you.”

No one wanted to approach, but someone tossed him a tattered rag toy that might have been a bear or a dog or perhaps a dragon. Beryl gave the doll a conscientious sniff and Jeff chewed it over in what Khazri hoped looked like a thoughtful manner. There were red threads drooling macabrely from the dog’s mouth, which meant he owed Imrael a new hat.

“What do you think?” he asked them quietly. Probably there were other things you were supposed to do to persuade dogs to take a scent - certainly the kennelmaster was looking at him strangely - but he’d never worked out what. Usually Beryl would do what he asked if she thought it was a good idea and Jeff would roll over and try to eat his boot regardless of what he said or did. Khazri shook him off now and tried to look serious, uncomfortably aware that they were the centre of attention now and if they didn’t do something soon-

Beryl nipped gently at his fingers and got to her feet. She trotted once around the clearing and then off, away from the path without hesitation. She couldn’t have picked up the trail, not yet, but she knew how to put on a convincing show even if he didn’t. Khazri took up his bow and followed her, slipping between the brittle skeletons of bracken, careful not to break the crust of snow on the ground. Behind him came Imrael’s light steps and lighter voice, telling everyone that this was completely normal, they’d find ah, Wyne was it, any moment now and yes those were definitely dogs, what else would they be?

Khazri followed Beryl through the winter wood and he did not look back. He didn’t want to see the strained face of the woman that must have been the mother. He thought only of the hunt, and not what would lie at the end of it.

 

 

***

“Are you sure?” Khazri asked. Beryl huffed and butted his leg. He ruffled his fingers through the thick fur at the back of her neck by way of thanks. A mortal hound might not have managed it but neither she nor her brother had been strictly mortal for a long time.

They stood on the edge of a lake, frozen pale as milk, grey and curdled where it met the shore. The snow was patchy and the ground too hard to take a print so her sayso was all the proof they had that the boy had been there. Without the cover of the forest the wind was stronger, thick with ice crystals that stung his cheeks and loud enough to snatch away their voices as they spoke. “Should we go out there?” Imrael called over it. The trees on the opposite shore bristled like dark fur. Not a welcoming sight but Khazri thought he was light enough to make it across to them.

“Too dangerous. This late in the season, the ice will be rotten. Near the shore it might have held a child’s weight for a while, but…” Esma let the wind eat the rest of her words. Even resigned to it the failure was bitter as the cold blowing off the lake, no doubt more so for those who’d known the boy.

“What possessed him to-” started the dog trainer, who eavesdropping had told him was called Breck, but she was cut off as another woman sank to her knees, pebbles rattling beneath her. Orenda he thought her name was, whose son was lost and gone.

The wind drowned the sobs and snatched away the tears, but did nothing to hide the jerking hitch of her shoulders. Human women didn’t think it weak to cry, but Khazri still found it awful to see. His own mother would never have lowered herself so. He turned away, searching the shore for any sign that the boy might have not have gone onto the ice and, when that failed, kept looking so he would not have to see.

There was a jutting finger of rock a hundred yards distant reaching out into the lake, spreading out into an island topped by a standing stone. He started towards it, not caring if it was rude.

The stones of the causeway were slick with ice and slime but Khazri’s balance was good and an easy scramble brought him to the foot of the monolith. He could still hear odd snatches of conversation from the search party, but it was easily ignored and the stone sheltered him from the worst of the wind. It was as tall as a woman, dark and weathered, rippled through with veins of green. Not pale grey shale like the slope he’d just climbed, but similarly fine grained. Khazri ran his gloved fingers over the smooth surface, the fabric clinging to the damp rock. There were fossils in it, the impression of weeds and fish, fat and toothy, frozen in the stone. People had been etched there too by a human hand, in blocky little boats. They were crudely done and Khazri got the feeling that whoever carved them had been more interested in embellishing her vision of the world beneath the lake.

The carvings seemed to swim beneath his hands. Scales and fins and bulging eyes, all coming together into some larger pattern. Something weed-furred and pebble-eyed with jagged fishbone teeth. There was only one point of discord. A body in the water, as crude as the stone-faced people in the boats above it. The mouth was open and the eyes stared like fishes’ as the lake’s stony jaws closed around it. He pulled his hand away.

Behind him came the rattle-scrape of someone scrambling over scree and then Imrael joined him in the lee of the rock, black hair come loose and whipped into a bird’s nest tangle. “Esma says it’s as old as the town,” he said. “There are a few scattered about, along the shore and in the woods, but no one prays there anymore. Not since the Yashethin came and built a proper church.” Formally perhaps, but the snow had been scraped away from the base of the stone to show the naked earth and the mulchy corpses of last season’s flowers. Someone had been there fairly recently. Khazri knelt to rub the dirt between his fingers but dirt was all it was, clean of any trace of blood. Imrael looked at him strangely then went back to finger combing the worst of the knots from his hair. “Do you know where gods come from?” he asked.

Khazri recognized the preamble to a lecture but took the bait anyway. “‘From the Chaos Before, the Lady of Spiders wove Herself’,” he recited, remembering the smell of incense and his aunt’s singsong drone. “‘She took up the tangled threads of the fabric of creation and made the world and the people that would inhabit it. From Herself, She wove her Sisters and Brothers to rule with her.’”

“But you don’t believe there are only your eight gods, surely?” Imrael prompted, a tutor encouraging a recalcitrant pupil.

“No. Afterwards, from the leftovers, she created other, lesser deities and other, les- uh. Other peoples.”

Imrael ignored the slip. “Just about every culture tells a similar story, substituting their own gods of course. Do you know what the theologians think now?”

“I’m not going to like it, am I?”

“Magic is, at it’s heart, focusing your will and exerting it upon the world around you. But people without the gift or the training still want just as badly. A god is an idea that provides a focus for that desire. We build institutions around them to attract more belief and focus it further - temples and cathedrals. Or monoliths.” He nodded to the pillar beside them. “We set up priests to direct all this stored will and use it to perform feats beyond the ability of any single mage.”

“A God can act without a priestess’ intervention,” Khazri said carefully, like a man stepping out onto quicksand or rotten ice. Imrael was dangerously irreverent but he was also much smarter than Khazri and always won when they debated, leaving him mired in a swamp of ideas he knew were wrong but couldn’t argue his way out of.

“Of course. But is that the conscious act of a sentient entity, or a discharge of excess power like a lightning strike? Miracles are too vague and ill-documented for us to be certain either way and the priests hardly welcome a more rigorous study. We understand where lightning comes from; we can create it in the lab with a few amber rods and a bag of cats. So now at the university in Antias they’re trying to create a god. Is naïve faith a requirement, or can anyone bring one into existence simply by wanting it enough?”

“That’s blasphemy,” Khazri said, without much rancour. “Besides, it doesn’t make sense. If we created the Gods, why would we make them…” There were a thousand things he wanted to say, many of which came dangerously close to blasphemies of his own and none of which really sufficed. “They aren’t kind,” he finished lamely.

“Perhaps we needed them to be relatable,” said Imrael.

“I didn’t think you were so cynical.”

“You’re a bad influence,” Imrael said with a poor attempt at levity. Khazri was used to his smiles, constant enough they’d weathered little grooves at the corners of his mouth, and this one looked forced in comparison. His eyes kept flicking to the lakeside, where the search party milled like cattle and a woman still knelt on the stoney shore.

“Do you think she did it?” Khazri said quietly.

“What?” Imrael stared at him. “Why?”

He hadn’t questioned why - it just made sense - but now he went scrambling for a motive. “A crippled child in a poor family. A hard winter. One less mouth to feed.”

“What the fuck, Khazri.” Imrael’s face was blank but for the little groove where his brows drew together.

“Just because people don’t like to talk about these things, it doesn’t mean they don’t happen,” Khazri said, trying not to sound too defensive, trying not to stumble over the words.

“Look at her. She’s in pieces.”

“Sacrifices aren’t supposed to be easy. That’s the point.” It was an effort not to look back at the monolith.

“Did you see something I didn’t? Do you have some reason to suspect her?”

 _An old stone and a bone-deep knowledge of how the world turns._ “No.”

“Then don’t twist this. A child is dead and I understand you want to find a way to- to solve it, but you can’t. Don’t do that to yourself.”

“This isn’t about me,” Khazri said, wishing he was surer that was true.

“Alright.” Imrael ran a hand through his hair, sweeping it back from his face. He sounded disappointed and it stung more than it should have. “Do whatever you think you need to. Just don’t get anyone hurt.” He stepped back out of the shelter of the obelisk and the wind caught in the loose black tresses. “They’ll probably be heading back soon. Let’s go down.”

“Sure,” Khazri said, probably too quietly for him to hear. He counted off a minute’s head start before slinking down the rocks behind him.

 


	2. Chapter 2

_“You’re a man now,” his uncle had told him when he was thirteen, burning with shame after waking from confusing dreams to sticky sheets. “More’s the pity.” He gestured and a goblin servant materialized with glasses and a bottle of wine. It was far too early and Khazri hated the earthy, bitter taste but he knew what was expected and took the glass his uncle offered without complaint._

_His uncle took a long drink. “I hope you don’t need the mechanics explained.”_

_“No sir.” Even if he had he wouldn’t have admitted it. His uncle frightened him. Lots of things had frightened him then._

_“Valian be praised for small mercies. Has Khamsin made plans for your future?”_

_“Don’t know. Sir.” Khazri plucked at the still-damp strands of his hair, brushing it forwards to hide his face - a bath and a change of clothes had done nothing for the lingering confusion and humiliation._

_“‘_ I _don’t know.’ You weren’t raised to mumble like some halfwit goblin.” Behind him, the servant stood motionless, her face impeccably blank._

_“Yes sir.”_

_His uncle rapped his nails against the rim of the glass. “The Gods made men to be weak and wanton,” he said with a sardonic twist to his mouth. “Your whore father more than most. Do you want to end as he did?”_

_“No sir.”_

_“Then you must be careful. You must never be alone with a woman. Dress modestly. Don’t allow them an excuse. It won’t protect you but what will?” He paused to drain his glass and then held it out for the servant to refill. “If Khamsin hasn’t made arrangements I suppose I shall have to. The church would be easiest. And safest. It would be honourable, though you would give up any claim to our name. House Il’harren would have no hold on you. Would that please you?”_

_His uncle was rarely kind, never to the bastard whose care his sister had forced on him, and so Khazri had thought it a trap. The real trap had closed months later but how could he have known that then? He screwed up his courage and said, “No sir.”_

_“No?”_

_“Our name. It’s all I have. I’ll serve. However my lady mother sees fit.”_

_“I said much the same when I was your age,” his uncle said, setting the empty goblet down. He’d been married young, Khazri knew, and widowered young too. Khazri wasn’t supposed to know why but servants and soldiers gossiped and his uncle’s late wife hadn’t been a subtle woman. Or a gentle one. His uncle sighed. “Do what you will then. I take no part.”_

***

The search party lead them back to town, for ‘town’ its people termed it. Khazri wasn’t sure that the ramshackle collection of longhouses, smokeries and slushy, unpaved streets warranted the name. The settlement crouched on the lakeshore like something ashamed, reaching tentative piers out to dabble in the lake. The wooden buildings were weathered as grey as the frozen water, and the waning afternoon light made even the brightest colours look washed out and dingy. It had leeched the warm colour from Imrael’s skin, turning it almost as grey as Khazri’s own.

Stares and whispers shadowed them through the streets, some concealed better than others. Elves were rare enough in human settlements and neither Khazri nor Imrael had the pale skin or red-gold hair of those native to the Emberwoods. Imrael didn’t take offense at the looks - did he ever? - and, when Esma asked, launched into a description of the desert libraries of Jatt-Harai. Imrael had no more visited his parents’ homeland than she had, but Khazri didn’t point that out, more than happy to let him be the center of attention. They were too far north and the area too poor for Khazri’s own people to have bothered with the town; if they knew of Zalach’ann at all it was through half-forgotten legend and not bitter experience. Still, it didn’t do to tempt fate. He ducked his head and tried to will himself inconspicuous.

They made for the Headwoman’s hall which stood back from the lake and back again from the rest of the settlement as though trying to keep its distance. Fenced in by the forest, it was larger and grander than any other building, but constructed from the same bleached wood. A defense against the cold but nothing, Khazri thought, looking at it with his mother’s eyes, that would withstand a concerted attack.

Where weather had bleached the outer beams silvery pale, within they were stained black by ash. The space inside was nearly as large as the great hall of his family’s manse but the noise, the smoke and the smell of unwashed bodies made it claustrophobic. Khazri didn’t mind confined spaces as long as he didn’t have to share them with other people and it felt like half the town was crammed into the hall around them. Any fear or awe they might have felt towards the elves was overcome by the desire for news from beyond the Emberwoods and Imrael was soon surrounded by a chattering crowd. He looked delighted to have someone other than a pack of sullen mongrels to converse with - _be fair_ , he chided himself, _the dogs aren’t sullen_ \- and Khazri left him to it. Breck’s dogs had not befriended his companions despite Jeff’s overtures but an accord had been reached and now they all lay stretched before the hearth, a respectful distance apart. That left Khazri to find a suitable corner to lurk in and contrive to be forgotten. It was easy when you had the knack.

Eavesdropping was a matter of course for him and they said nothing he hadn’t heard a hundred times before. ‘The elf lord and his servant’ had stolen the child. They’d killed and eaten it. They were here with a changeling to replace it, the faery queen’s own babe. They’d come to curse the town, to lift the curse, to sink it into the lake. They’d been sent by the Gods, or the Hells, or by his Lordship. He got the impression, watching a woman hop to turn her left sock inside out, that they would prefer all other options to the latter.

Stares and gossip aside, they were courteous enough hosts. Too courteous, for Esma insisted on feasting them. Imrael tried to refuse, said they had their own supplies and when that failed offered recompense, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Hospitality demanded no less, even though Khazri could see the desperate tally in her eyes as the meal was served. The town had no upper class to speak of but there were skilled crafters, women and men who owned their own boats or a house with more than one room, and it was they that sat at the tables set around the hall. Only forty people in all and still too many for her to feed. They were served smoked fish, boiled turnips and a pasty slab of salt pork in pride of place. He ate as sparingly as politeness would allow and regretted even that much.

The bread was grey-green with a familiar, bitter taste and he remembered from the winter he’d first come to the surface, when he’d chewed bark stripped from the trees to quiet the complaints of an empty stomach. Not just bark. Grass, worms, carrion even the crows wouldn’t touch. _Eat it_ , he told himself, _and be glad they haven’t fallen as far as you_.

Beryl sat beneath the bench, pressed against his legs so that he could feel her sides vibrating with an inaudible growl. Crowds made her jumpy. Or they made him jumpy and sometimes it was hard to separate who felt what. Jeff butted her aside to stick his head in Khazri’s lap, eyes pleading. They usually shared food but one look around the hall - hushed as people prioritized filling their stomachs over conversation - told him how well that was likely to be received. He pushed the dog away with a silent apology and a promise to go hunting as soon as they could. Perhaps the woods weren’t picked entirely bare.

Breck, sitting beside him, saw the movement. “So how’d you do it? Some elf magic?”

“Um?” As graceless as ever. It wasn’t only his uncertain birth that had kept his family from letting him attend their balls and banquets.

“You think I can’t tell a wolfhound from a wolf?” the woman said. “You think anyone with eyes can’t? How’d you tame them?”

“I met them when they were pups,” he said reluctantly for they weren’t tame for all that they sometimes chose to act like it. “They were hungry and...I fed them.” Which wasn’t the whole story but cages, madness and a woman eaten alive weren’t fitting dinner table conversation.

“And that’s all it took?” She hissed between her teeth. “Faeries.”

Khazri looked down to where Jeff flopped at his feet, front paws raised beseechingly. He’d never intended to use magic to bind them to him - you needed far more skill to create a familiar than he possessed - but sometimes he wondered. “They’re not so different from dogs, are they?” In truth he had no idea and still thought of them as such, even years after learning better. A shameful amount of what he knew about them was guesswork and hearsay.

Fortunately Breck was more than happy to talk his ear off on the subject. If she felt any fear or awe at what he was, she cared more that she had someone to lecture on feeding and whelping. Useful information and it saved him the struggle of keeping up his own side of the conversation.

She ruffled the ears of a brindled bitch who’d joined Jeff begging beneath the table. “Come back in a few weeks and it’ll be her served up on a platter. Hunting’s scarce and we can’t spare scraps anymore. It’ll be hard though. Swine don’t expect nothing better but a dog will trust you right up until you slit its throat. I’ve seen one lick the hand that held the knife e’n as he bled out.”

Jeff snarled at that, lips drawing back to show bone-pale teeth, and Khazri’s stomach lurched in a way that had nothing to do with the food. “So…” he cast about for a change of subject. “You’ve had winters like this before?”

“Oh yes. We’ve survived worse and will again. Still. Ever since his lordship sat his arse down Dawnwood, it’s gotten harder.” She seemed to have forgotten that Khazri was, ostensibly at least, the Arroways’ agent. Well, he wasn’t about to remind her; Lord Dorian Arroway stormed and sulked and schemed but, when it came to it, did not act. Milcom would have no help from him. Humans said a man could rule as wisely as a woman but Khazri had yet to see the proof of it. The sooner his daughter had him set aside the better.

He made another clumsy attempt to find a safer topic. “It must be hard for her - uh, your Headwoman. She’s young to lead, isn’t she?” He struggled to judge human ages but as near as he could tell Esma was barely older than himself.

“Her mother, Eyota, was a great woman. She held this town together through famine and flood. When a hag cursed us so’s the lake turned red and the fish floated up and rotted on the shore, she found the witch and broke the spell. When the trolls came down raiding from the mountains she went out to meet them and drove them back with steel and fire. We lost her to a fever two winters ago. Nasty business - a woman like that should die sword in hand. We shan't see her like again.” She drank off her mug of watered ale in toast and Khazri had no choice but to do the same. “We all hoped Esma would be her mother come again.” Breck shrugged, said damningly, “she does her best.”

Esma might not be her mother but the feast was shrewd enough politically. A distraction from privation and the dead child that put the focus and the blame on the Arroways and the amelioration of the town’s circumstances they might bring. Deliberately or not, Imrael had played into it, had already straightened the twisted leg of the woman from the search party, soothed a feverish child, and plucked the cataracts from an old man’s eyes. He sat with Esma now, head tipped back to laugh at some joke but Khazri could see untouched food on his plate and the slight frown that pinched his forehead.

Imrael had the features for frowning - straight, dark brows and a hawkish nose that might have added up to something stern on another face. On his, softened by a smile and shadowed by the dark fall of his hair, they gave him a look of benevolent enquiry. His eyes were a bright, warm amber when the light hit them and, lest Khazri seem too enamoured, flat brown when it missed. It missed them now and they were muddy with unease. Imrael liked to fix things and this town wasn’t something a few small acts of charity could mend.

Khazri looked away at the screech of a bench pushed back. Down the hall, a white haired man - when did human hair go white? He must be over a hundred - stalked towards where Esma sat at the head of the table. He might once been stout but hardship had hollowed him out and now his cheeks sagged like empty purses. Khazri had sat through enough politicking back home to know when someone meant for drama and could not but note the man had waited until he’d eaten his fill to begin it. A woman got up from her own seat as he passed her, tall and broad with a gaunt, weathered face and close cropped hair.

Breck nudged him in the ribs. “That’s Firman who owns the general store,” she said, like there was more than one store. “And Young Avery with him, the blacksmith.”

“Young?” Avery was a great bear of a woman but her black hair was shot through with iron at the temples.

“Her father was Old Avery, and her grandmother was an Avery before that. Even with them dead, the name’s stuck. Now hush boy, it’s about to get good.” All conversation had died and Khazri guessed that whatever was about to happen had been coming for a while.

“Time was,” said the old man, enunciating dramatically, “you couldn’t walk along the shore without tripping over a kelpie. When your mother took her seat she sent them back to their caves and they never troubled us again.”

“Kelpies didn’t take Wyne,” Esma said flatly. “Any fool knows they don’t hunt this late in the season.” Her face was round and soft as unproofed dough but her posture was confident and her eyes were the dangerous grey of rotten ice.

Firman bristled. No woman liked to be called a fool and no man either. “Ask anyone in town; Wyne was a good boy. Hard working. He wouldn’t have wandered off like that without cause. Ask his mother.” Who was, Khazri noted, conspicuously absent. Left to her grief or kept away from the brewing conflict lest she object to being a pawn in it.

“You’ll have to find a new errand boy,” Esma said. “His death was a tragedy but you’re looking for a scapegoat where there is none. Unless you think this was something other than an accident?”

The old man flinched at that and his mouth trembled. Khazri could feel Imrael trying to catch his eye and looked everywhere but at the elf. Beneath the table, he heard claws clack on wood as the dogs began to pace. He reached down to quiet them, ran a hand through Beryl’s fur while Jeff seized and worried at his sleeve.

“We aren’t here to talk about Wyne,” Avery said in a slow, hoarse voice. “We all grieve but like you say, it was an accident. We have bigger problems.”

Esma drummed her nails upon the planks of the table. “We’re doing all we can. I am not a wizard to clear the trade routes with a snap of my fingers.” That would take more than a wizard. The roads this far from Dawnwood were too poorly maintained for wagons in parts, and those that still saw traffic were haunted by bandits. He and Imrael had skipped them altogether for the most part, following game trails through the Emberwood but that wasn’t an option for merchants.

“Is that all you can offer?” Avery rumbled. “Arroway sits in Dawnwood curled up like a hedgepig while the roads go to hell. They don’t even send tax collectors anymore! These are the first of his lordship’s men we’ve seen in two years.” She sneered over the ‘men’.

“Well,” Imrael said helpfully, “technically we’re his daughter’s-”

“Is something going to be done or not?” the blacksmith interrupted. “We have fish oil, glue, isinglass and fat lot of good any of it does us sitting in our storehouses. We need to trade for grain, cloth, iron.”

“When the roads are clear-” Esma began.

“And when will that be?”

“When Dawnwood gets word from us-”

“I say again, when will that be?” Like all northwomen, Avery’s skin was too dark to show her flush but the forge-burns that pocked her face blazed stark and angry. “When spring comes so the merchants can pick over our thawing corpses? Your people starve, Esma, their children taken in the night-”

“I thought we weren’t here to speak of Wyne?” Esma snapped. “But no, let us. That’s one less child to starve. Our two problems solve themselves, do they not?” There were murmurs from around the hall and Khazri feared she had gone too far. Jeff bit down harder on his arm, only the stiff leather of his bracer keeping the dog from drawing blood and Khazri hid a wince. His mother had suffered fools no better, with his aunt Amihan and half the court scheming to undermine her, until the day her patience frayed and snapped completely. Now his aunt was a head shorter and all knew better than to question Khamsin Il’harren. He looked to the sword at Esma’s side and wondered if she had the skill to win herself respect if not the charm.

“Word will get to Dawnwood. And his lordship will act, I will see to it myself.” Imrael produced his notebook and flourished a quill. “I’ll put your grievances to him. You’ll all be heard. Perhaps if everyone could form an orderly queue...?” His voice wasn’t commanding but it was bright with confidence. Imrael probably would give the list to Lord Arroway and then be terribly upset when his lordship paid no heed to the woes of some provincial peasants. Well, even if it came to nothing, he’d diffused the tension in the room. Firman glared, Avery’s fists clenched against her sides and Khazri saw other unhappy faces in the crowd but no one spoke. Imrael thought himself charismatic and to be fair he was. But he was also, however oblivious, an inhuman miracle worker and it was for that that people listened to him. He’d be ever so embarrassed if he ever realised.

With him distracted there was no one to miss Khazri as he slipped from the main hall to lurk in some forgotten storeroom until the dogs were calm. The press of people was too much and he couldn’t risk one of them injuring someone. That and he didn’t want to hear anything more about the dead boy. There was no reason to think that it was anything other than an accident. No reason at all.

But his mind kept going back to the obelisk and the cleared space before it.

Whatever Imrael thought about Gods, their favour was invaluable. A God could raise a dead hero, lift a famine, cement an uncertain rule. And a life could buy an awful lot of favour.

***

Sleeping out in the hall before the embers would have been warmer but there was propriety to consider and servants of his lordship warranted a bedroom. It was surprisingly well appointed, with a wooden floor, a washstand and two straw-stuffed pallets raised on wooden frames. There was dust over everything though, enough that they both sneezed when Imrael flopped down onto one of the mattresses. Beryl put her ears back at the movement which she’d never done before - they liked Imrael - but he didn’t seem to notice. “They did say no one had visited in awhile,” he said, bouncing to make more dust puff up.

Khazri unfolded a moth eaten blanket. “We’ve both slept with worse.”

“Well I certainly have. I knew a historian who thought we should all go back to sleeping on the floor as we did in prehistory. I’m fairly sure it was so no one could tell him he was terrible in bed.”

“Really.” Khazri checked the corners for spiders.

“Oh yes, it was awful. Or did I tell you about the naturist naturalist who-”

“No.”

“Well she-”

“Good night, Imrael.”

It was too cold to undress so he kicked his boots off and curled up with the dogs on the other bed. On the road, with only thin canvas between them and the winter chill, they’d all had no choice but to sleep pressed together, Imrael mumbling in his ear and elbowing him in the ribs every time he turned over.

He had dreams sometimes of which he was ashamed. More than once of late he’d woken hard and aching and had to climb over Imrael’s snoring body and slink off into the woods to take care of things.

Never be alone with a woman _,_ his uncle had said. But men didn’t count, everyone knew that. Sometimes he wondered, _suspected_ , that if he were a little less quiet, a little less afraid, things might be different between Imrael and him. But he would never have the courage.

 _One night of peace_. He told himself he was glad of it.

***

He did not dream of dark hair and clever fingers. There were other things closer to the surface of his thoughts. He slept poorly as he always did when it was too cold to bed down in just his clothes - he always felt smothered by blankets - and woke hours before dawn. The sheets had tangled about his legs in the night and he kicked free of them with slightly more force than necessary, stamping away shreds of his dreams with them. There were fresh gouges scored in the wood of the door and Jeff and Beryl were both up and pacing, looking every bit as restless as he felt.

Imrael was a shapeless cocoon of blankets on the other side of the room and Khazri barely restrained himself from poking him awake to check there was still something alive in there. He was perhaps louder than he needed to be in putting his boots on and breaking the ice at the washstand and was rewarded when Imrael rolled over and said sleepily, “s’matter?”

“The dogs woke up,” he said, shaking icy water out of his eyes. “Sorry. We’re going hunting. Back by dawn.”

“Mmph.” Imrael turned over to face the wall and Khazri waited until his breathing had deepened again before slipping from the room. With any luck this would be forgotten come morning.

They glimpsed a mangy fox sniffing around the midden heap behind the hall but she was too wary, gone before he’d even raised his bow. It didn’t really surprise him; the woods in the area must be picked clean by now, only the most cautious animals left alive. But no hunter from Milcom could go after them in the dark and that gave him a chance.

He’d walked only minutes before the forest closed in behind him, cutting him off from the town. The woods, dead and ugly in daylight, were painted gorgeous blue and silver by the night. The trees reached up like stalagmites and their shadows rippled across his body like water as he slipped between them. He paused to break off a handful of pine needles, crushed them and rubbed the juice through his hair and over his clothes. Night birds whirred and rasped in the trees and the cold, sharp air and the pungent smell of sap cut the lake’s miasma from his lungs. Jeff yowled with pleasure, a sound caught between a wild wolf’s howl and the baying of a hound.

An owl glided overhead, pale and silent as a cloud passing before the moon. He shot it.

Owls weren’t good eating but no one had ever told Jeff that. Khazri and Beryl watched him choke it down with something between affection and disgust.

“You could at least offer to share,” he hissed but the dog was incorrigible and didn’t even look up from his meal.

Trailing feathers, they picked their way along a game trail until it ended at a frosted over stream. The snow along the bank had been trampled to muddy slush by deer and smaller game and there were droppings no more than a day old scattered about. It was as good a spot as he was likely to get. The dogs pressed on alone; they didn’t have his patience and he didn’t have their stamina for the chase.

There was a thicket of reed skeletons some thirty yards upstream and downwind, chased in silver frost like one of Yasheth’s reliquaries. They clattered hollowly as he pressed through to the centre but stilled quickly and then it was just a matter of waiting.

He enjoyed the time before a kill. Invisibility was a state of mind - everything was a state of mind to an elf - and it was soothing to put aside worries and fears, ignore the cramp in his leg and the frost crusting his nose, become so hollow that light could shine right through him.

Hunting had always been a family pastime though he’d never been allowed to ride out himself. He’d remained at camp with his cousins, Gilavar pacing the clearing and sulking that he could not join the chase and Tehaneth picking at his embroidery and sulking that he’d been expected to come at all. Then the women would return, laughing and breathless, with silk-wrapped bodies slung across their mounts. His mother would nod to him and his cousin Cierza would ruffle his hair and tell stories, wildly exaggerated, of her valor. He’d felt part of something then.

Time passed. The moon had almost set and he was resigned to returning empty handed but for a pocketful of feathers when he caught movement through the treeline, the sounds of breaking branches and feet pounding on the snow. His joints creaked and frost crackled on his cloak as he stood, putting an arrow to his bow and pulling taut in one slow, smooth movement.

A buck broke through the treeline, eyes rolling, sides heaving, and gathered itself to spring across the stream.

His shot caught it mid leap, just behind the front leg and he hissed out a breath between his teeth as it stumbled, recovered and bolted into the trees on the other side. The dogs came tearing on behind it, eyes alight, too intent on the chase to spare him a glance. Their passage set the reeds rattling again while he picked his way through more carefully.

The blood that speckled the bank where the buck had landed was pinkish on the snow, flecked with tiny bubbles. The lungs then. Alone he’d have allowed half an hour for the buck to bleed out in peace before he followed but the dogs had never learnt to wait.

It was already dead by the time he caught up with them, sprawled out in a clearing, snow dappled red about its mouth and torn throat. The dogs paced about it, eyes bright, noses snuffling at the rich, warm stink of the corpse. In other circumstances it would have been wasteful to field dress the carcass but this was their kill as much as his and they preferred the offal. He took his gloves off to work the knots as he strung it up and the blood ran syrup thick over his hands, forming tacky little pools under his fingernails. Scrub as he might, he’d be carrying the death with him for days. The innards steamed as he laid them out in the snow, smelling rank and sweet in a way that made him gag even as his stomach reminded him how little he’d eaten the day before.

He pulled the buck’s heart out and Beryl nosed at it delicately. If he’d still kept his Gods he would have dedicated it to Arteru of the hunt and the hunted. But as so many times before, he could not bring himself to say the words. He handed it to Beryl and stood to look down at the carcass.

One deer wouldn’t end a famine but it wasn’t nothing. He could track and shoot, provide for himself. He wasn’t a child anymore; he wasn’t worthless. Whatever had happened to the boy, whatever these humans had done, it was something he could deal with.

He left the dogs there - they liked the town no more than he did and it wasn’t fair to ask them to return. Probably it was outright dangerous to have them about when they were all so stressed and ready to lash out. He walked back with the body across his back, the sun rising behind him and his hood pulled low to shield his eyes.

***

He had cause to regret his decision soon enough.

There was blood on the trail. Not the fresh, pinkish stuff dripping from the carcass slung across his shoulders but brown dimples in the snow so dulled by age they looked like dropped pennies.

He shrugged the deer to the ground and approached, carefully not to disturb any other signs but he might as well not have bothered. There was a muddle of booted footprints blurred by time and weather - more than one person but too confused for any better estimate - and signs that something had been dragged. Only a little blood, likely from a single cut or graze leaving no trail to follow. All the signs vanished under the trees where the snow did not reach.

He hadn’t come this way the day before with Imrael and the search party - they’d taken the longer but surer route along the lake’s shore - but if one was to head straight from the town to the standing stone with no regard for paths then one would pass through this clearing. If the boy had been here, Beryl could have told him so.

But of course the boy hadn’t been here.

The footprints, the drag marks, even the blood could be easily explained - were someone to stumble upon the bloody snow where the dogs had brought down the deer it would look like a murder scene. With game so scarce, even if no one admitted to making a kill that could only mean that they were keeping news and the meat to themselves. There was no proof of anything.

But there was no harm in asking questions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter art by [Callum Stannard](http://callumstannard.com/) and I'm on tumblr in the [obvious place](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com/)!


	3. Chapter 3

_His uncle wasn’t well (“Drunk. You can say it,” his mother told the apologetic servant) and so there were to be no lessons that day. She could have sent him off with the servant but on occasion it pleased her to have him with her as she went about the family business._

_They were planning an expedition to - a raid on - the western marches; his mother, his grandmother, Cierza who was old enough, and the captain of their troops. When he’d been younger he would sit beneath the table and play with those markers they weren’t using to map out their deployment. He’d cut his first tooth chewing one of them, a little onyx horse with pricky ears that represented a cavalry unit. At twelve he served as cupbearer, standing to attention behind his grandmother’s seat with a jug of watered wine._

_“Here,” said his grandmother, the margravine, finger stabbing at the map. “The forest will cover our advance. Khamsin will lead the vanguard, Cierza will hold the left, Captain Abroheth the right and I shall command the reserves.”_

_“Why not give Cierza the van,” said Abroheth. She was his mother’s crony but Khazri disliked her. She had cold eyes and a mouth that pouted like a fish. “She needs the experience.”_

_“The center must hold,” said his grandmother. “If her women break we’ll be overrun.”_

_“Not necessarily,” said his mother. “If she falls, the barbarians will want to press their advantage, rout us. We let them persue us into the trees and then our flanks can pivot in and crush them.”_

_“It’s nice to know you have such faith in me, Auntie,” Cierza said wryly. Khazri thought his cousin played at being a drunken lout so that Khamsin wouldn’t see her as the threat her mother had been. He also thought that Cierza herself no longer knew where the act ended and the real woman began. Here, perhaps, was a glimpse of the steel beneath the rust._

_“It would be foolish not to prepare for the worst. By all accounts you chafe under the tedium of court life. I thought you wished to prove yourself but if you are afraid-”_

_Cierza ignored the bait. “Shall I prove myself suicidal? Better to look a coward than to be a corpse. I’m sorry to disappoint but I’m not my mother. I won’t be goaded.”_

_“No. You’re not so brave as she was.” Khamsin smiled, thin and sharp, and raised her glass in toast. “But perhaps less foolish. The van is mine then. ‘Value every life.’ I shall try to spend mine dearly.”_

_Later, after the others had bowed their way out, his mother still stood over the map. She held out her glass and Khazri hurried forwards to pour. His hands shook, just a little, and a few drops slopped over the edge of the glass._

_She frowned. “Don’t look so frightened, boy. It’s not so dangerous as your cousin makes out.”_

_He was bothered less by that - at twelve it was inconceivable that she could die - and more by her smile of concession when she toasted Cierza. He hadn’t seen it before._

_It had looked like something close to pride._

***

“How in God’s name did you manage this?” Esma said, glaring suspiciously at the deer carcass where he’d dropped it before the hall.

Khazri shrugged.

“Being his friend is a lot like having a cat,” Imrael said sleepily, leaning against one of the wooden roof supports. He took a drag from his morning cigarette. “Be glad he didn’t leave it on your pillow.”

It was an invitation to banter but Khazri was too preoccupied to do anything more than shrug again.

Esma cleared her throat. “I appreciate the meat. Truly. I’ll ensure that everyone gets a share.” It wasn’t a particularly large deer and he wondered how she intended to accomplish that as a woman stepped forwards to carry it into the hall.

A small crowd had gathered to look at the carcass, warily silent. The spell was broken with its removal and they began to disperse. Some lingered with wan, hopeful expressions, those with staves, slings and crutches, coughs or a sallowness that went beyond the pallor of too much work on too little food.

“More healing?” Khazri asked.

“Of course.” Imrael stifled a yawn. “May as well make a difference while I can, as long as you don’t mind staying another day?”

“Mm.”

“You’re talkative this morning.”

Khazri didn’t disagree.

“Everything alright? Are you sulking about the cat thing? I didn’t mean it. The deer’s going to make a real difference to everyone.” Imrael said, apparently sincere. And then, because he couldn’t help himself, “and I treasure that frog torso from yesterday. I’m going to have it stuffed and mounted when we get back to Dawnwood.”

“I’m not upset. Just thinking.”

“Think you’d like to help out? It will go easier with a lovely assistant.” The flattery meant nothing. Imrael flirted with everyone, would probably flirt with Jeff if the hound stayed still long enough.

“No. Errands. Sorry.”

“Then don’t let me detain you,” Imrael said, his brows drawing together because he wasn’t stupid and Khazri was terrible at dissembling. “Remember what I said. No one gets hurt!” He had to shout the last part; Khazri was already walking away.

He went where people didn’t look or looked too long, following the holes trod in conversation like footprints in the snow. The path was slickly patterned in black weed and rime as he picked his way to the house where the boy had lived. It was a single story, built of pale planks with rags stuffed between to stop the holes where the wood had warped and twisted. There were cords of firewood piled beside the door left, he thought, by neighbours in lieu of food. A fire burnt inside and he could hear cloth rustle as someone moved within but it was a long time before he could bring himself to knock.

It was a long time before the door was answered.

He’d remembered her as tall (because Khamsin Il’harren was tall) but she was short and hunched over to seem shorter, worn and weathered as the town. Grey ash streaked her hair in mourning and her mouth, tired and twisted, twisted further at the sight of him. Neither of them spoke but when she turned away she left the door open.

He stepped inside and pulled it closed behind him, ducking to avoid the broken oar propped beside it. He glanced around the shack, eyes skipping over the low ceiling, the dirty crockery in a bucket by the door, the curtain that divided the single room in two. The wooden table was scarred and pitted, most of the markings fresh, and there was a knife jammed into the surface halfway to the hilt. Used for gutting fish, probably, but sharp enough to lay open a throat. Too deep in the table for her to get it out before he killed her, he decided and relaxed a little.

She’d sat down by then, on a stool beside the fire, and gathered up an armful of nets. They splayed out around her, dripping down over her skirts and she took up a shuttle and began to darn. There were great holes torn through them and he wished he knew enough to say if that was normal. Probably a child couldn’t tear them like that no matter how he struggled.

“Kelpies,” she said into the silence. “Fucking kelpies. Shred the nets for fun and you can’t even eat them.”

“What can I do?” he said at last. He wished she’d just attack him and get it over with for he was surer of his knives than of his tongue. She was a woman but she was older than him and he couldn’t imagine she’d been trained to fight.

“How are you with knots?”

That wasn’t the question he’d been asking but he answered; “fair.”

She grunted and indicated the stool beside her. No sooner had he sat then she dropped a shuttle and a pile of cord into his lap. She did not look at him but turned back to her own work.

He shook them and spread them out to match hers, carefully so that they wouldn’t impede him drawing a knife, then watched the movement of her hands. Her joints were swollen but her fingers were still nimble in their movements, darting like minnows in the shallows.

All boys learnt to weave and embroider, so it didn’t take as long as it might have for him to see the pattern. The thread was coarser than he was used to and his stitching wouldn’t have impressed his uncle but once he’d found the rhythm the work went easily. It was a pleasure to be faced with knots that could be untangled and tears that could be mended. He watched her as he worked and she watched him and neither of them found what they were looking for. Finally she sighed.

“Don’t you have something to say?”

He flexed the cramps from his fingers and shifted to feel the reassuring press of the blade strapped to his thigh. “I’m sorry for…” He didn’t finish.

“I’ve had enough of that. I suppose I’m grateful. For finding...for the nets.” She did not sound it. She sounded tired, grey ashes over the low banked fire of her anger. “Now what do you want? What bargain do I have to make?”

He wondered how he must seem to her. Some mad fairy stepped from one of their stories to grant wishes and cobble shoes in exchange for a soul and a saucer of milk. “No bargain. It doesn’t work like that,” he said at last. “I’ll help you if I can but- What can I do?”

“Find Wyne. Bring him home. Esma won’t do a thing. She’s all bluster. I’d fetch him back myself ‘cept  I don’t know where to begin. I catch fish. I know how to catch fish.” Her voice caught there but she rallied. He couldn’t tell if she spoke from grief or guilt - he had never heard either in his own mother’s voice.

He nodded. It was easy to promise, nothing he hadn’t planned to do already.

“And what will you have in return?” she asked.

He barely kept from glancing about at the obvious squalor of the shack. There was nothing of hers that he wanted but to say so would be cruel and it was not how these things worked. “Fish,” he said instead. “Teach me how to fish.”

She looked at him for a long moment, perhaps to see if he was mocking her, but at last she nodded. “Good then.” She held out her hand and they shook before the fire. Her grip was strong, her fingers cold.

“Can you...tell me of your son’s habits?” he said when she offered nothing more. “Did he go out alone often?”

“Often enough. He isn’t strong, and his hand makes it so’s he can’t work the nets.” She glanced at the pile of cords in Khazri’s lap and then away. “But he’s always wanting to help and he can bait a hook. He usually brings home something, even in this cold.”

“I thought it was too late in the season for fishing.” Her use of the present tense sat uneasily. Whether through mischance or murder, she had to know the boy was dead and buried under ice.

“Well he does what else he can. Sweeps up around the forge, runs errands for folks. He has a good head on his shoulders, knows how to make himself useful. People like him. The Lake washes the kindness out of folks but they like him all the same.”

“You were proud?” It rang, incongruous, in her every word.

“Of course I’m proud of him.”

 _Of what?_ he wanted to say. _A cripple? What life would he have had?_ But he stayed silent.

“He wants to be a wizard,” she said. “Like your friend. He wanted to be a dragon first, for the longest time, but then he got old enough to know that wasn’t how it works. O’course, he can’t be a wizard either, there isn’t the money, but he’s smart. Smart enough to go to the city when he’s old enough, smart enough not to be up before dawn hauling nets ‘n’ going to bed stinking of fish guts. He could do better than this town.”

_No. He couldn’t._

Khazri had never thought of himself as poor. Even in those first awful months, when he was hollowed out by hunger and frostnip chewed numb patches on his ungloved fingers, it had been something to overcome, not endure. He’d been born in a mansion, been fed, clothed and educated as befitted a noblewoman’s son, bastard or no. He could read and write, sew and weave, dance and play the dulcimer, albeit poorly. He’d never had the talent for magic, couldn’t cast anything you’d call a spell, but his heritage still came to him in the quickness of his movements, in an uncanny way with animals, in how people’s eyes slid over him without seeing when he desired it.

Would Moire the hunter have taken in any grubby urchin she caught stealing from her vegetable patch and taught them to shoot? Would Jeff and Beryl have done anything other than eat a human child? Son of a dead whore that he was, he had preferred to risk starvation in the woods but there were ladies and lords who would have taken him in for his blood and for his looks. An ugly elf was still an elf after all and in the cities fashionistas bleached their hair and rubbed ash into their skin to look as he did.

He’d been so very lucky. His choices might not have been good but he had had them. His mother had made sure of that. The dead boy hadn’t even had that much.

But that truth was far too cruel. Khazri didn’t grant wishes but if talking kept the boy alive to her for another hour then his time was a small price. So he finished darning the net while she told him about her son. Childhood anecdotes polished pebble-smooth by the retellings, incoherent scraps of memory - a laugh, the smell of his hair, the toy bear with the missing leg. Her own life too - she’d been born in this town and planned to die there. She’d fished the lake, made enough to live on, even enough to live well sometimes. If she’d had dreams of anything more for herself, the lake had eaten them long ago.

None of that answered the question of what had happened to her son. She could hope him still alive or lie too well for a stranger to detect. She might be hiding what she’d done even from herself. Or he might be too biased to see the truth staring him in the face.

***

The general store was unsigned and it took him ten minutes of lurking before he found it. It was a long, sprawling building that looked more like a warehouse than a shop and the interior did nothing to dispel the illusion. It was a maze of crates and casks, booby trapped with tangles of net ready to drop from the ceiling, wobbling rolls of canvas, and unsteady stacks of barrels that a careless jolt could send toppling. They were labeled as containing autumn’s apples, eggs, cured meats and pickled cabbage but when he rapped on one he was unsurprised when it rang hollow. The room smelt unpleasantly of rancid tallow and spilt vinegar and he wondered if the old man had a wife to manage the business for him, or if he had to do it all alone.

Shuffling footsteps sounded behind him, uneven as their owner was forced to weave between fat hogsheads and pick his way over treacherous coils of rope. Firman was dressed well, for Milcom at least, in a starched linen shirt and dove grey waistcoat that made Khazri uncomfortably aware of his own appearance - he was used to being overshadowed by other men but it was galling to compare poorly to a human.

“What do you want then, Elf?” the old man said, brusque but not unfriendly.

“Arrows,” Khazri said, which wasn’t technically a lie. He had almost three dozen in his quiver but they, unlike Imrael’s stupid hats, were a necessity and you could never have too many.

The old man huffed a sigh that inflated his saggy cheeks and slowly picked his way through the clutter and into the back of the shop. Khazri poked through a shelf of dusty millinery while he waited, one ear tilted to catch the sounds of the Gods alone knew what being rummaged through. Drooping plumes and motheaten wool quashed any thoughts he’d had of finding a replacement for Imrael’s mangled hat. He was debating the merits of choosing something utterly unsuitable when the man returned, just as slowly, and dumped a bedraggled sheaf of arrows on a convenient kilderkin with another sigh.

They were fletched with the same manky grey feathers that adorned the hats. He could replace them himself with the owl feathers he’d collected but most of them felt underspined, too flexible to fly straight. Khazri was only a passable archer with only a passable bow and even so he found it hard not to wince.

“No game about,” the man said defensively. “Not much call for hunting supplies, even in season.”

“How do you kill kelpies then?”

“Spears, usually. Iron tipped and forge heated. They come to shore to foal in summer and the heat makes them stupid. Have a look at this.” He ducked behind the counter, rummaged a moment and came out grunting, cradling a thick roll of material. It came dangerously close to catching in the nets strung from the ceiling and Khazri had to lean over the counter to help him steady it. It was lusciously soft to the touch and velvety black as the surface of a pool after dark, studded with droplets of water like reflected stars. The whole thing stank like the stirred up mud at the bottom of a pond and his hands came away damp. He wrinkled his nose and Firman nodded.

“It doesn’t dry and tanning does nothing for the smell. Can’t sell it like that. Really I only keep it for the memories. I got this one myself, see,” he said, puffing out his concave chest. “That was some forty years ago, o’course. Suppose that’s the blink of an eye to one of you folk.”

Khazri shrugged noncommittally. Humans tended to be less than impressed upon finding out that he really was only as old as he looked. “How did you kill it?” he asked politely. Stories grew from graves like flowers and this was no exception. Cierza had been fond of telling overblown, meandering hunting stories and he’d learnt by necessity how to listen with half an ear while nodding and making approving noises at the right times.

“Those were the days,” Firman finished, bringing him back to himself and there was his opening. “Things were better then.”

“Why is nothing being done? To, um, to make things the way they were?” He tried to sound sincere, like he was looking for a way to help and not a confession. “If kelpies are taking children again, isn’t there something that you, that anyone can do?”

“I’m just an old man, no one cares for my opinion anymore,” Firman grumbled, with a tetchiness that sounded even more rehearsed than the kelpie story had.

“I’m sure you’re a respected-”

“You wouldn’t know it from the way everyone carries on, even after all the things I’ve sacrificed for this town. I could have made a better living in Highbridge but I stayed here out of loyalty because I knew I could make this town great. Eyota listened to me, sat me at her right hand, but after she died up comes that slip of a girl, all fancy education and no common sense, no idea how a community should-”

“Doubtless but-”

“-only valued for her name-”

Khazri gave up on tact. “What about the dead boy?”

The man looked peeved at the interruption. “Orenda’s lad?”

“Last night- everyone seemed-” He could think of no good way to say it. “If he drowned or kelpies took him or- or if it was something else-”

“What else? The cold makes folks desperate and he was always headstrong. Only so many errands I could make up for him to run and they needed to keep themselves fed somehow. The poor boy drowned”

“But you said-”

“She twisted my words to hide that it’s her fault it came to this. He went out on the ice because he was starving and he was starving because Esma didn’t put enough grain by. Someone needs to call her on it and I’m a community minded man.”

“Of course.”

“I could do better. I could make this town prosper, you see if I-”

“Thruppence for the arrows.” He held up the five he judged least poorly made.

“They’re a penny each,” Firman snapped out, annoyance at being interrupted outweighed by eagerness to make a sale.

“Five for them...and that,” he said, pointing to the dusty hat shelf.

***

It was hot in the smithy, the closest he’d been to a normal temperature in weeks. The great hall had been warm last night but with the damp heat off too many bodies in too small a space, fogged with breath and sweat. The heat baking from the forge was closer to the scorched air of the volcanic city where Khazri had been born. He pushed back his hood and immediately regretted it as Avery pulled out a glowing lump of metal and began to pound it flat against the anvil with great strikes that made his ears ring.

“What do you want, Elf?” she got out between blows. “Thought your folk couldn’t stand iron.”

He fidgeted, glancing about at the iron tools propped up against the walls and heaps of scrap metal waiting to be reforged. “No better than yours.” The pile was mostly horseshoes; not much call for them when all the horses had been eaten, he supposed.

“So a knife through the heart is mortal, eh? That’s good to know.” She looked up at him and grinned to show she wasn’t serious, or perhaps to show she was. The soot that painted her face made her skin look near as grey as his own. “Have you saved us yet?”

He thought of the scrawny deer. “No.”

“I’d hurry up then. They say you were sent for this.”

There was something in her voice that made Khazri think she didn’t mean by Lord Arroway. He shivered, not from cold, and then blew on his hands to pretend it was. “They?”

“Everyone. Esma for one. Your coming must have seemed like an answered prayer to her,” she said and brought the hammer down.

“A prayer to Yasheth?” He’d seen the church behind the hall, a blocky stone thing that stood out in a town of driftwood huts.

“Hmph. Out here it’s to whoever listens.” The red hot metal drew out beneath her hammer, flattening until he could make out the taper of a chisel blade. “But she’s forgotten that. Like her mother did. All that work wasted building a church to a god what doesn’t do us a lick of good. Yasheth tells us we’ll be rewarded in the next world so we must be content to suffer in this one. Does that sound right to you?”

“I’m not Yashethin.”

She turned and plunged the chisel into a waterbutt, making the metal hiss and spit like an angry cat. She set it aside and turned back to him, dropping her hand to rest on his shoulder. “Who do you pray to, Elf? Do they listen?” It might have been meant as a friendly gesture but her palm mapped too closely to the outline of the scar he’d taken eight years earlier. He flinched, too aware that she stood a foot taller than him and near a hundred pounds heavier.

“We weren’t sent by a God,” he said, voice sharpened by discomfort.

“Would you know if you were?” She removed her hand, unoffended, and smiled again, teeth limned red by the light from the forge.

He ignored the question. “Orenda said the dead boy worked for you.”

“And everyone else in the town. Is this about what Firman said last night? You shouldn’t listen too much to that old coot, he lives to make trouble.”

“So it was an accident?”

“What else? Listen boy,” she said kindly. “You’re not here to solve a murder. You’re here to save a town. Time is short and dearly bought, don’t waste it on intrigue. Esma and Firman are bad enough.” She turned back to her forge.

He took the dismissal for what it was and fled.

***

Milcom’s church of Yasheth was smaller than the chapel to the Lady that his family had maintained and far less grand. It was built in the shadow of the great hall but while the paths to the woodpile, the storehouses, the animal sheds were churned all to muck, the trail to the chapel’s doors was all but trackless.

The door - a proper door, iron hinged - opened with a congested creak. The inside was dark, which didn’t bother him, and choked with dust and cobwebs, which did. It told him clearly enough how well regarded Yasheth was within the town. There was no reason to go inside but he knew that if he did not it would be because of cowardice.

Even if no one else ever knew. That was when it was most important to be brave or so his mother had once said. He took a breath. Let it go. Took another. And stepped over the threshold into the ossuary.

***

Long before his birth, Khazri’s aunt had risen from the dead. His grandmother and her surviving daughters had prayed to the Lady for her blessing and formed a body from spellworked flesh and memory. Reconstructing the personality had been harder though, so much harder. The family did not speak of the thing that had resulted, that still walked the hallways of their manor wearing a familiar face.

What the Yashethin did was much the same.

When one of their priests died, the bones were stripped and enshrined in a church, decorated as lavishly as could be afforded. They spoke with the priest’s voice, offering comfort and advice to their congregation and humans said it was because that some part of them remained in the bones, sacrificing whatever was supposed to be their fate for the sake of their people.

The bones in this chapel were strung about with ropes of lake-smooth pebbles and freshwater pearls and all three sets were free of dust and webbing, set neatly in their alcoves.

He wasn’t about to kneel to human corpses but he dropped a couple of pennies into the offering box. _Another sacrifice_ , he thought and barely restrained himself from snatching them back.

“Any advice?” he said to the most recent relic. He hadn’t asked for the council of his own Gods in eight years, not sure if he was more afraid that they wouldn’t answer or that they would.

“Believe in yourself,” said the skull in a dull, hollow voice.

“Dress warmly,” said her sister in the next alcove.

“Hold your breath,” said the last, “and don’t look down.”

He rolled his eyes. “What of the future?”

“You will make an important decision,” said the first skull.

“You will find love,” said the second.

“You will make a sacrifice,” said the third.

 The fortune tellers at village fairs put on a better show than that. He considered stealing back his pennies but there was no sense in inviting the displeasure of a God, even one as weak as theirs.

“Master...Kasri.” Headwoman Esma’s voice from the threshold.

He turned and bowed. “I answer to ‘Elf’, my lady.”

“I doubt you prefer it.”

He shrugged.

“Well I answer to ‘Esma’ and I’d be glad if you used it.” She smiled wearily.

“Esma,” he said and bowed again, falling back on old courtesies, uncomfortably aware that he was unchaperoned with with a young woman. She was blocking the doorway but probably hadn’t realised it could be taken as a threat. Women didn’t think that way.

“Esma,” echoed one of the skulls behind him, making him jump.

Esma laughed. “This is Mother Cyneburg. She was a nasty old witch but she saw to it that I learnt my lessons well.” She stepped forwards and brushed her hand across the smooth bone of the skull’s crown as it made the sudden, uncomfortable change from an object to something that had once been a person in Khazri’s mind. “There’s been no priest here since she died. We sent for one but...we’re a long way from Hallowstone and the message must have been lost.”

“You always have the lake.”

“The Lake. My grandfather called an end to that nonsense. He reached out to the Yashethin, decreed that any of their mendicant priests would be fed and housed if they passed through. My mother saw this church built. ‘If we want to be taken seriously’, she used to say, ‘we mustn’t hold to old superstitions like backwater peasants’. We are, of course.” She laughed humorlessly, her strange, pale eyes like icy pools in frozen earth. “But it doesn’t do to seem more credulous than we must.”

“Has it helped?”

“It’s made them hate me. I went to Hallowstone for schooling, did you know? I didn’t want to go but Mother thought it would make me a better ruler. She had ambitions. See what they’ve come to.”

He looked about the dusty chapel, walls hung with dirty webs, and shuddered.

“Did you come here to pray?” she asked. “I didn’t think faeries cared for Yasheth’s teachings.” She’d learnt diplomacy if nothing else. Yasheth, Imrael had once informed him, taught that elves were wicked demons who coveted the grace of an eternal soul. Khazri could understand that humans needed to pretend that while they aged and decayed, while their flesh shrivelled on their bones, some ineffable part of themselves stayed pristine and would live on after their short lives were done. What he didn’t understand was their conviction that elves were jealous of their magical internal parasites and wanted to steal them for themselves.

“My family’s very devout,” he said, not quite in answer but he could be diplomatic too. “One of my aunts is a priestess.” Son of a temple prostitute, nephew to a woman who had risen from the dead, and he himself was a consecrated servant of the Lady. He was well acquainted with Gods, even if they were no longer on speaking terms.

“A priestess? I didn’t realise you were well born.”

That shouldn’t have stung as much as it did. “I’m not.” Not in any way that had counted at the last.

She frowned at his tone. “As you say. I’m sorry if I’ve seemed cold or ungrateful. I aim for lordly but I think I miss more often than not.” She was human, a grubby backwater lordling, but there was something in her manner of the Margravines of Zalach’ann. Though they would never have admitted weakness.

“There’s little to be grateful for,” he said ungraciously, embarrassed.

“The goodwill you’ve bought me, more than the healing. Or the deer.” She looked at the skulls, tapping her fingers against the pommel of the sword at her hip. “What do you think happened?”

“To the boy?”

He could tell her. But her eyes were cold and her face was stern and in them he saw a shadow of the implacable will of Khamsin Il’harren.

There was nothing he could say that would not make him look foolish or hysterical. What had he found today? That the dead boy had been poor but loved. That people were hungry and unhappy? That they cared not for her or for her God? She knew it all already.

“I don’t know. I hope we can help your town.”

She sighed. Relieved? Disappointed? “I hope so too.”

“Excuse me,” he said, brushing past her. He ran his hands through his hair and shook out his cloak but nothing had dropped on him from the church’s ceiling. Nothing but dust. But that didn’t still the crawling down his spine.

He’d been putting it off but there was one place left to look. One witness left to question. Just because none of the townspeople would give him the truth, it didn’t mean there weren’t others who knew what had happened upon the lake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter art by [Callum Stannard](http://callumstannard.com/) and I'm on tumblr in the [obvious place](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com/)!


	4. Chapter 4

_Even veiled, the twilight was too bright. He pressed his face to his mother’s back to blot it out, holding tight to her swordbelt, breathing in the comforting smell of leather and armour polish as the horse swayed beneath them. Schorl was seventeen hands with a coat that rippled blue-green-black when the sun caught it. She’d been bred for war rather than a smooth gait and, riding sidesaddle, he feared every step would jolt him to the ground._

_The streets were deserted and the hooves and booted feet of their troop rang loud. He heard a cock crow, muffled and far away; they must have left the birds in their coop that morning._

_Every door was shut up tight, warded with iron. One of the soldiers used the tip of her sword to knock down a horseshoe where it hung precariously above a lintel. It fell with a clang provoking a scuffle from inside and a laugh from the soldier. She raised her fist to rap upon the door and Captain Abroheth snapped out, “no games, Soldier.”_

_“Ma’am,” she said, falling back into formation._

_The tithe was piled in the centre of the village; sheaves of wheat blazing golden like cords of firewood stacked for a bonfire, an avalanche of fat kegs, a garden's worth of vegetables still crusted with earth._

_Abroheth lifted Khazri down and his mother dismounted behind him. “Load the carts,” she said. “There’ll be time for horseplay when we’re back beneath the stone.”_

_Khazri looked around at the locked doors, the empty streets. “Why are they so afraid?” The court never took what wasn’t freely given and the gifts were only fair; the crops wouldn’t be half so fine without their blessing, the lands half so safe without their vigilance._

_He had been addressing the captain but it was his mother that answered. “Our deals were struck with their grandmothers’ grandmothers. They forget the good we swore to do them and remember only that we come with the dark and that we take.”_

_“And we_ are _very frightening,” said Abroheth. “Don’t you think your mother’s scary?”_

_He nodded because it was true and his mother smiled and ruffled his hair. “Only my foes need fear me. And Abroheth if she doesn’t watch her tongue.”_

_“I can watch my tongue or your back, my lady, not both.”_

_They walked away, still talking, leaving Khazri alone in the empty street. He didn’t mind so much; the surface was very interesting. He tried to count the stars as they rose, was distracted chasing moths, tore his robes climbing a tree and stole six apples from one of the crates._

_He was just feeding Schorl her share when one of the soldiers approached him and he had to drop the leftovers into a patch of weeds._

_“Here, boy,” she said and pressed a bundle into his arms._

_He frowned down at the squirming, mewling creature. He’d raised runty wishthound pups and spiderlings under his bed in secret but he’d never been given a pet before. “Can I keep it?”_

_“Don’t think it’s been weaned,” said Abroheth, walking up to peer over his shoulder. “And it looks sickly besides - probably why they left it for us. Sorry boy.”_

_“We’ve got one in the kitchens that whelped recently,” said her sergeant. “She might take it.”_

_“Would be easier just to leave it. It’ll only waste away and it’s cruel to let him get attached.”_

_“A deal is a deal,” said his mother. “We take the good and the bad. If it lives, my son can keep it.”_

_The baby didn’t live, in the end. But he appreciated the sentiment._

***

He found Imrael back at the hall, sitting so close to the hearth his boots were covered in ash, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. He was pale and slightly dazed-looking, the way he always got when he went at his work too hard for too long but at least he’d had the sense to stop before he ended up collapsed in the snow somewhere. Under the smoke from the fire Khazri could smell the acrid sweetness of iodine and suppuration.

Some mages insisted on peace and solitary meditation to regain their focus but Imrael preferred the opposite and so Khazri walked up behind him, making only a token effort to move silently, and pulled the hat down over his eyes. The ugliest thing for sale in Firman’s store, it was made of lumpy, rust red wool trimmed with fox fur. Shopping he could take or leave but there was pleasure to be had in petty acts of vengeance. And a distraction from what he was about to do. “I’ve brought you an apology,” he said as Imrael yelped and flailed to his feet.

“Very funny.” Imrael snatched the hat from his head and held it up to the light, grimacing. “What on earth is it?”

“A gift. To make up for the one Jeff ate.”

“You bought this? For money?” For all the mock disgust in his voice, Imrael’s eyes had lost that glazed, stupefied look and Khazri considered it two pennies well spent.

“I thought the colour would suit.” It really didn’t.

“Orange does bring out my eyes.” Imrael put the hat back on, tugging at the earflaps until it sat at a suitably rakish angle. “Thank you. I didn’t think anything could replace the frog torso in my affections, but I shall treasure this all the days of my life. Do I look dashing?”

“Very,” Khazri said solemnly.

“I shall never question your sartorial choices again. I’m never going to take it off.”

“I can’t tell who’s spiting who anymore.”

“Let’s call it a draw,” Imrael said, plonking back into his seat but not removing the hat. “I just talked to the Headwoman. At length. I get the impression she doesn’t like me very much.”

“Did you explain that Yasheth’s miracles were a quantifiable natural phenomenon?”

“Don’t tell me you listened yesterday! That means almost as much to me as this beautiful ha-”

“Esma.”

“Right. Well, I don’t think she dares to say it but her resources are dwindling, her people find us disturbing and our millinery is frankly terrifying. I fear our welcome’s all worn out.”

“We can leave with the dawn.”

“Good, good. I had to call a break but I think by nightfall I’ll be finished. Not finished but I’ll have done everything I can. I’ve healed sores and drained swellings but that’s just treating the symptoms. Malnutrition is the root of it and there’s nothing I can do for that.” He shifted uncomfortably, leaning closer to the fire. “Well there is. But I thought I should talk to you first…”

“You want to give them our supplies.” They had enough waybread and dried meat to last them, at a conservative estimate, another three weeks. Easily the four it would take to reach Dawnwood if they went a little hungry and Khazri supplemented their stores with hunting.

He frowned and Imrael raised his hands placatingly. “I know, I know, but there are children and even if we can get supplies sent down from Dawnwood, the developmental effects in the meantime will be disastrous. Some families have enough squirreled away that they can last but for the ones that don’t we need an immediate solution.” His eyes shon feverishly in the firelight and Khazri wondered, not for the first time, why he’d attached himself to a madman.

He knew how to be hungry, certainly better than Imrael did. He ran his fingers through his hair, remembering a time when malnutrition had left it coming out in clumps, and wondered what his mother would say at the thought of starving for the sake of ungrateful serfs. “I didn’t say no.”

That brought Imrael up short. He’d clearly been prepared for more of an argument. “Really?”

“It’s a small sacrifice,” said Khazri. A little risk, a lot of discomfort. But proof that he knew how to make them. Hadn’t the skull said as much?

“Thank you. That’s a load off my mind. You’re a good man, Khazri.” Not by Imrael’s standards and surely not by his own.

“Just don’t complain,” he said brusquely. “I can’t carry you back to Dawnwood.”

“Are you sure? I’m not very heavy and trudging through the snow with me in your arms would be picturesque in a tragic-romantic kind of way.”

“You’ll be lighter still after living off bark for three weeks. Go get some rest,” Khazri said. “You can give away all our food when you’re not having hysterical fantasies.”

“Maybe I should.” Imrael stretched, yawned hugely, almost tripped over the bench as he got up and then wandered in the direction of their room.

He didn’t remember to take his medicine bag with him, which wasn’t surprising since Khazri had quietly kicked it under the bench out of sight. Rifling through it produced the bottle of brandy that Imrael kept stashed away for somewhat dubious medicinal reasons. He’d probably miss it before Khazri got a chance to replace it but his liver wouldn’t and when you put it that way it was really doing him a favour. Khazri didn’t think Imrael would put it that way but he’d probably be too upset about all the other things Khazri was about to do for it to matter too much.

***

All the stories he’d heard had said ‘horse’ and when still the kelpie did look very much like one. When she moved however she was entirely predatory and Khazri found himself wishing futilely he’d brought one of Firman’s spears with him. She opened her mouth to yawn and her entire head seemed to split in half revealing teeth like jags of rock exposed by the tide.

“Go away,” she said in a voice slow and smooth as undertow. “It’s too cold to hunt.”

It had been easy to find this cave for some considerate local had carved warnings into the rocks and trees for miles about. It had been very easy to scramble down the bank and pick a path through the stones (and other things that rhymed) that made up the cave floor to find the slick bulk of the sleeping waterhorse in the gloom. It had been easier still (and very, very stupid) to toss pebbles about her until she woke with a snort and a kick of her hooves. He thought now that it might not be so easy to leave.

“I’m sorry to wake you.” He bowed, the full obeisance due to a ruling lady. “But I have an offering for you. Will you trade?” He held up the stolen brandy, letting it dangle loosely in his grip - if she rushed him, the bottle would shatter.

She looked at the alcohol for a long moment - if she was annoyed, her face didn’t show it - then nodded her head, splattering droplets of water across the cave floor. “What?”

“Safe passage for myself. From you and all your kin - you shall not harm me or hinder me or lead me unknowing into danger.” Old words that he hoped he remembered correctly.

The kelpie nodded again, impatient. That game was no fun if both sides knew the rules.

“And answers.”

Shaking more water from her pelt, the kelpie rose to her full height. She was shorter than him at the withers, no bigger than a pony, but in the cramped closeness of the cave she seemed to loom far larger. Her mane hung lank and weed green to her fetlocks and her midnight coat rippled with every movement. “Ask.”

“Tradition dictates three questions,” he said, remembering, trying to imitate the imperious tone his grandmother the Margravine Il’harren would use to address supplicants.

She blinked lambent white eyes. “Ask, little sister.”

Khazri swallowed. He didn’t fear drowning or the kelpie’s fangs. The cave’s dark confines held no terror - how could it to someone born underground? - and the lair was too damp for spiders. The only thing to be afraid of was failure, a final confirmation that he was on a fool’s errand.

“I want the body of the last child to die in this lake.”

She grinned - the expression sat strangely on her horsey face - and turned away, her hooves clopping hollowly as she headed deeper into her home.

He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t. He followed.

The air was close and rank, growing ranker still as they went further. There were more bones, brown and mould-specked, some of them human, many of those small.

 _Little sister_. With his short hair and shapeless clothes it was easy to mistake his gender and no Zalach’anni boy would come armed and unescorted to play at deals with her - or him, for Khazri had made assumptions too. In the language they spoke, the old tongue of their people and not the townsfolk’s northern argot, it was proper to default to female. In truth the waterhorse was closer kin to him than they were. They both lacked souls to hear the humans tell it and neither would die rotten from the inside out after a too-brief span of years. And they both understood the importance of deals. Those that dealt with magic knew that a spell was a lie so convincing that the world believed it. To tell an untruth without due consideration was to court disaster.

That didn’t make it any easier to hear the hollow crunch of bone underfoot. But the townsfolk had their monsters and he had his, and the kelpie was not one of them.

“Here,” she said at last. She bent her head to nuzzel at something on the ground like a true horse nosing the turf.

The skeleton was more complete than the others in the cave, ragged tendons still binding the parts into a whole. The bones lay pale and vulnerable, still capped with dark, tightly curled hair. A filigree of mould had grown up over it, lacy mushrooms spilling from the eye sockets and poking up between the jaws like tongues. It had not been there a year but no more had it been there three days.

It wasn’t the boy he was looking for.

The kelpie grinned her sly, reptilian grin as he stepped back in horror. Could he have been so badly wrong? Did Orenda’s son still live? Was he insane?

No. Just naïve.  

“It was the wrong question. He was dead before he ever reached the lake,” he said aloud.

The kelpie did not have the shoulders for shrugging but made a good attempt. “I dealt fairly.”

“You did,” he said through gritted teeth. He set the bottle down beside the bones - let her work out how to open it without hands. It itched to turn his back on her but the deal would keep him from harm as he picked his way back towards the sky.

“Wait,” she said. She spoke with the lap of waves at a bank and the slurp of a foot pulled free from a bog. “Sister. I know what you really seek.”

“That wasn’t the deal.” His hand slipped beneath his cloak to the knife at his belt. Renegotiating could only go ill for him.

“I will not lead you unknowing. There is danger. But if you drown yourself, you’ll have no need of safe passage.” Her tongue flicked out over her teeth to make her point. “It is cold. The ice will keep you until spring, just as it keeps what you are looking for.”

“Lead on then,” Khazri said, as brash as any girl. He could not leave things as they were. With iron or answers, we slay our monsters however we can.

***

He stepped out onto the ice. It groaned beneath him like a dying animal but it held. The kelpie walked out beside him, legs sliding through the surface as though the water were still liquid.

“That way,” she said, indicating with a jab of her muzzle. “If you find your lungs filling with water, you have walked too far.” She took another step, sinking out of sight beneath the ice.

The sky had cleared to give the dying sun one last glimpse of the world and in its light the ice burned bright enough to hurt his eyes. He walked across the vast expanse of white, feeling the cold rising off it through the soles of his boots.

A heron flew over, ungainly wings flapping like laundry on a line, and he stopped to watch the swoop of its shadow across the ice. It dipped and landed a hundred yards to his right, beak flashing down to stab at something at its feet. He walked towards it and it took off again, croaking resentfully.

Where the heron had stood, he found what he’d sought. The hole had already begun to scab over with clots of pale ice. Without the bird he might never have seen it. It was round and smooth-sided, cut by human hands.

He knelt at the edge and peeled off his glove to dip his hand into the slush, stirring the black water beneath. The cold was sharp enough to cut, and the feeling seeped from his hand like blood from a wound. Weeds tangled about his fingers, fine as hair.

There was no ‘as’ about it. He caught a handful and pulled.

The body came up easily, for Orenda’s son had not been a large child. He - it? - hadn’t bloated or split for which Khazri was thankful, but enough fish had braved the cold to take the eyes and lips. There was a pink, puckered slash across the throat, bone deep.

Would Orenda want to see this, he wondered. A pretty memory of a smiling child, or closure and a fish-ravaged corpse?

What would Khamsin Il’harren have chosen? When they were done with him, would she have wanted something to bury?

Foolish questions. He knew the answers, had always known them. What had he even hoped to find out here? How could he ever have thought this would help?

Khazri made to rise. Looked down at the boy’s ruined face, like a moon reflected in the black water.

Had he been deceived or drugged, or had he come out here knowing what would happen, as Khazri had once known? Had he been given a choice?

Certainty crystallized like ice.

He had promised Orenda he would find the boy and bring him home. But that was not his only reason. No, he would drag it from the lake for spite. This was not his God and he owed it nothing. This one it would not get to keep.

He got a grip under the corpse’s flaccid arms and began to lift, the ice beneath him creaking in protest. He ignored it, dragged the body up and over the lip of the pit, water streaming from its clothes, its open mouth, the gaping hole in its neck.

The ice shuddered beneath his feet as he began to drag it back towards the shore, twitching like a dog with fleas. It would be faster to pick the body up and carry it, but he was afraid the extra weight would put them both through. That and he didn’t want it any closer. It stank despite the cold; the green-brown smell of lake water and beneath that, the smothering sweetness of rotting waterweed and rotting flesh.

If he looked back he could see cracks spiralling out from the hole like blind, seeking hands. So he did not look back. Chunks were floating loose now and he walked faster, panting out white puffs of air. He wasn't going to make it. Still, he kept moving.

The ice screamed.

Suddenly he was cut off, encircled by fissures on a rocking island of ice. He kept his balance and kept his grip on the body, throwing it over his shoulder. Water and other things soaked into his clothes as he ran. It was a five foot leap to the next chunk and it tilted near vertical as he landed, water splashing around his knees.

He set his weight forwards, clawing with his free hand and regained his feet. Ran and leapt again, scrabbling for every inch closer to the shore. He might have made it, corpse and all, but the cracks were moving faster, the floes getting smaller and, under the ice, something was moving. Not the kelpie, she had sworn, and this was far too large besides.

The piece he stood on lurched and twisted, bucking with the animal determination of a horse throwing its rider. _It doesn’t want to let him go_ , he thought, absurdly. And then the ice tipped and he fell.

The kelpie laughed somewhere, shrill and whinnying, and then the sound cut off as his head went under.

The water struck him like a blow, knocking all the air from his lungs and the world spun black and white and black. The cold tore pieces from him; breath and sense and reason. He kicked out blindly, not sure if he was going up or down, and ice scraped against his cheek. He couldn’t break through, couldn’t see where the ice ended and the sky began. He scratched at it with fingers so numb he could claw the nails from them and never feel it. There was a thin layer of air trapped beneath the sheet and he managed a single, gasping breath and then something caught about his ankle and tugged, hard.

He looked down and his scream came out as bubbles.

The water was dark, but he saw them well enough. Down on the lakebed, they looked up at him and smiled. They could not help but smile.

_The light’s too poor, the water’s too murky. You cannot see that deep._

The corpse in his arms twisted, cold fingers closing about his wrist.

The others reached up to him from beneath, children dead and eaten, beckoning with fish-gnawed fingers. Their hair was weeds and minnows darted in and out of their empty eye sockets. Sisters and brothers who’d paid what he’d refused.

_This is not real._

Beneath them something else moved. Something huge. The lake was hungry.

Gods always were.

He’d seen this _want_ before, beneath the temple of the Lady, but there they had clothed it in gilt and ceremony. Now it came naked, cold and terrible and it opened its fishbone jaws to swallow him whole.

 _This is_ not _real._

Water filled his mouth and the weeds that tangled around him were the webs of long ago. The chill spread through his blood like venom.

He was cold and tired and eight years dead by rights.

And, as eight years ago, he did not want to die.

He fought past the exhaustion and the terror and tore his eyes away, looked up. He’d sunk lower in the water, and he could see light shining down through the breaks in the ice, the gap where he’d fallen through. He kicked for it, limbs sluggish, weighed down by the boy he carried with him.

The choosing was the hardest part, but that didn’t make the rest of it easy. Gasping, choking more than breathing, he breached the surface. Water and wet hair blurred his vision and he groped blindly for the edge of the hole.

He jarred his wrist against it in a way that might have been painful if he weren’t so numb. The corpse was lighter so he got it out first, sliding it up and over where the ice was thickest. He tried to follow, lying as flat as he could manage and crawling forwards on his elbows. Everything shuddered and the edge gave under his weight.

It was too cold to panic. He tried again, his arms a little weaker, his head a little closer to sinking back below the water.

“I dealt fairly,” said the kelpie’s voice from somewhere behind him. “If you would only stop struggling-”

“Fuck off,” he snarled. As last words went they weren’t very good ones.

Jaws closed about his shoulder, teeth pricking through the sodden layers of his clothing. Something else caught his hood, pulling it up to obscure his vision and almost choking him. He thrashed in response, trying to struggle free, draw a weapon, gouge its eyes out all at once.

A growl sounded by his ear, vibrating through him to his bones and a predator’s rank breath panted hot against his cheek.

He stopped fighting and let himself go limp with exhaustion and relief. _Beryl_. Which meant Jeff had his hood. Their paws scrabbled across the ice, claws anchoring them against the drag of his waterlogged clothes.

With their help he managed to creep ashore to collapse shivering, gasping incoherent thanks through chattering teeth. He embraced them, briefly, let Jeff lick at the rime forming in his hair, and looked back to see the kelpie’s head protruding from the hole.

“That was to be my supper come the spring,” she said mournfully.

He might have said something pithy about fair dealings but his teeth were chattering too much and he was too concerned with the sudden question of what she would eat instead. So he said nothing and turned away.

He crawled, dragging the corpse, dragged by the dogs himself until they were close enough to the shore he could risk getting to his knees, clinging to Jeff for support, and then to his feet. He picked up the body - it was an awkward burden, the limbs locked and stiff, but he hugged it to his chest.

Then he walked.

***

It was after dark when he got back to town and he’d long since stopped shivering. There was still smoke rising from the chimneys of Esma’s hall and a smaller plume spiralling up from where Imrael stood upon the steps, hands cupped protectively around a cigarette.

He took a theatrical drag as Khazri approached and flicked ash onto the snow. “Where did you run off to? You left me to fend for myself with a man who wanted me to cure him of a very _personal_ affliction and woman who wouldn’t stop talking about dogs. I hope you’re proud.” He’d been out there a while, judging from the number of butts stamped into the snow. “What have you got there?” He didn’t have Khazri’s night vision and had to squint until there was only a yard between them. “Khazri?” he said. And then he saw it.

The cigarette fell from his hand to hiss itself out upon the snow. Khazri watched, dully fascinated, as the colour drained from his cold-flushed cheeks. “I found them,” he said. Jeff and Beryl danced about his feet, tails stiff, ears flat against their heads.

“‘Them’? Gods, what happened? Where were you?” Imrael’s breath steamed when he spoke. Khazri’s didn’t. He puffed a few times to make sure.

Imrael kept staring at him and he realised answers were expected. “The lake. I fell in.”

Taking a step back, Imrael rapped with his fist upon the hall door, keeping his eyes on Khazri. No one answered so he turned and kicked it, hard enough the hinges rattled. The door creaked open in a rush of heat and Imrael pushed past the startled man on the other side with the dogs at his heels, turning back when Khazri didn’t move to follow. The firelight hurt his eyes and it seemed safer to stay out in the night but Imrael held out a hand to him. “Come inside, Khazri. You’ll catch your death out here.” He spoke slowly, as if to a child.

“They’re dead,” he explained. “They can’t hear you.” The noise in the hall was rising as the people within caught a glimpse of what stood upon their threshold.

Esma elbowed her way to the front and then stopped, stared. She paled even more impressively than Imrael had, but her voice was cold and calm as she ordered the hall cleared. She reached out to take the body, had to pull quite hard before he remembered to relax his grip. “Hells,” she said, looking down at the corpse. “You need to explain yourse-”

“He can explain when he’s not freezing to death,” Imrael said briskly, taking Khazri’s arm and hustling him over the threshold.

“I’m not cold,” Khazri said. The grip on his arm was too reminiscent of the dead things in the lake, but he couldn’t work out how to explain it so that Imrael would let go. “They’re all down there,” he said. “For years. I was with them.”

“You’re not there now. You’re safe. Come over by the fire and lie down. Slowly, that’s right.”

Silence rippled out around them as they entered the hall proper, and then everyone began talking at once. Despite Esma’s order the room was still full of people, faces blurred and smudged as though viewed through dirty water. They’d cleared one of the tables to lay out the body, and everyone crowded around, a murder of crows picking over a carcass. At least they weren’t looking at him.

“Where...is my mother here? They do these things.” His fingers wouldn’t bend to catch Imrael’s shirt and his hands slipped off leaving little reddish smears. That wasn’t right. “It’s not about the blood,” he explained. “That’s just a symbol. Of what we’re willing to give up for them.”

“For...mothers?”

“Gods.” He stumbled and would have fallen if Imrael hadn’t kept his hold on his arm. “They claw out a space for themselves. Inside us.” There were cobwebs in the corners of his eyes, gone when he blinked. “They lay eggs there, eat from the inside out. They make us hollow.”

“Lie down, Khazri. Try not to move too much.”

“It’s poison,” he said as Imrael eased him down onto to the floor before the fire. “I can’t feel my feet.” He couldn’t remember how it had happened but the numbness and the glassy detachment were so familiar. Now, as then, he knew dimly that he ought to be more frightened. He groped at his shoulder, the left one where the fangs had gone in. It ached but he couldn’t find the wound, only coarse ridges of scar tissue. It didn’t make sense. He scratched at it until Imrael caught his wrist.

“Not poison. Hypothermia. I know you’re confused but everything’s going to be fine,” he said, textbook bedside manner with a razor of fear hidden between the pages. “We need to get your clothes off now, alright?”

“What?” That made no sense and he was still turning the words over when Imrael pushed his hands aside and began to unlace his jerkin, movements brisk and impersonal. “There are people,” he said weakly. He was still trying to decide if he should struggle or attempt to help when someone’s feet came to a stop beside his head, distracting him. Boots with frayed stitching, the leather gone lichen-blotchy with age. He followed them up to find legs, a torso and then the dog woman staring down at him. Jeff and some of her hounds had followed her over, crowding round to sniff at him until she shooed them away.

“Blankets,” she said, holding out an armful. “And this.” She set the pile down on the floor and pulled a dented metal flask from her pocket. “When a lad falls out a boat a shot of akavit always sees him right.”

“Likely to do more harm than good, I’m afraid,” Imrael said, tugging the last knot loose. “But I could do with a drink. I don’t know what happened to my- never mind.”

She unstoppered the flask and took a swig then passed it down to Imrael. “You alright down there, Elf?”

“There wasn’t a boat.” The chambers under the temple were warm and dry. The spiders didn’t care for water.

“Sure there wasn’t.” She looked back to Imrael. “Aught else I can do? He’s not sounding too-”

“He’s _fine_. Will be fine.” Imrael sounded upset and Khazri wanted to tell him not to be but his mouth was full of cobwebs. “Tea will help if he’s lucid enough to drink it. Could you set a kettle to boil?”

They talked over him like that, the thread of their conversation getting all tangled up with the crackle of the fire and the dogs’ panting until he wasn’t sure which sounds had meaning. He watched spidery cinders scuttle in the hearth while the floor rocked gently beneath him - maybe they _were_ on a boat.

Then someone was tugging at his belt and the shock of it dragged him back to something closer to awareness.

“Stop,” he said thickly, struggling to sit.

They said something he didn’t follow but didn’t let go. He batted at their hand, fumbling for a knife with numb fingers. Something grabbed his wrists and pinned his arms above his head. He didn’t know where the dogs were or why they didn’t help him. He tried to kick and everything tilted sideways. Everyone was still talking, louder than before, but he was underwater again and it was all distorted.

He drowned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on tumblr in the [obvious place](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com)!


	5. Chapter 5

_When he was eight or nine he’d broken his arm climbing on the watchtower roof to feed the bats. He managed to keep it hidden for two days trying to find the spell to heal it on his own. He failed of course and by the time a servant found him in the stables, curled up in an empty stall, his arm was swollen like an overripe fruit, the veins gone black and turgid._

_“Perhaps we should amputate,” said his uncle dryly. “Teach him that arms are a privilege, not a right.”_

_“So are tongues,” said his mother and his uncle snorted and drew out the infection with a word._

_She wasn’t good with children, had no desire to be, but she was a soldier and had spent enough time going amongst her women in field hospitals to offer a rough kind of comfort. “You were brave,” she said, sitting with him afterwards her cool hand covering his where it fisted the coverlet. “That was well done. But you should learn to set a bone. Next time there might be no one to help you.”_

_Her grip was firm, fingers ridged with calluses, the nails kept short and clean. He remembered that more than the fever-blur of her face._

***

His head became less fuzzy though not his immediate environment. He was lying prone, pinned beneath a hot, heavy body, hair tickling his nose. He blinked to clear his vision, just in time to avoid getting saliva in his eyes as a warm, wet tongue laved his face.

“Ugh, Jeff!” He wriggled in an ineffectual attempt to free himself, but the dog took it for a game and only licked him more vigorously.

Khazri managed to wedge his forearm between Jeff’s slathering jaws, giving himself a chance to catch his breath without receiving a mouthful of fur and dog spit. He was still in Esma’s hall on a pallet set before the hearth, lying beneath a covering of blankets and dog. The room was empty but for Jeff, Beryl asleep across his legs and Imrael sitting beside him, a book open in his lap. Shadows roosted in the high rafters and crouched beneath the benches. The hall was too large to be so empty and the space made Imrael’s voice sound strange as he asked, “how are you feeling?”

“Well enough.” He was tired still and chilled despite Jeff’s warmth and his fingers burned like the twigs popping in the hearth, but Imrael seemed to take him at his word.

“Good,” he breathed. And then closed his book with a snap, eyes flashing in the firelight. “What were you thinking? No explanation, no note, you just vanish for hours and then turn up with hypothermia and a dead child!”

“I didn’t kill him,” Khazri said. It was disconcerting to see Imrael anything other than cheerful; it was like Jeff suddenly deciding to savage him. He levered himself up onto his elbows, ignoring the way the room spun around him. Lying prone left him too vulnerable.

“Why would you even say that? Of course you didn’t. Do you have any idea how worried I was?”

“No? I didn’t think-”

“You never do,” Imrael said, flopping down beside him on the mattress, avoiding sitting on Khazri by inches. “When I told you not to get anyone hurt, _you_ were included. If you don’t communicate-” He cut himself off. “You did try, didn’t you? I should have listened back at the stone. I’m sorry for that.”

“Don’t be,” Khazri said hurriedly. “I didn’t really believe myself.” He tried to smile, but it was probably ghastly and he changed the subject instead. “How long was I...?”

“Maybe five hours? Certainly not long enough. If you want to go back to sleep-”

“I’m fine,” he said. “What did I miss?”

“Somehow I knew you’d say that. Just the autopsy. And then Esma wanted me there when she told his mother. It was as bad as you’d expect.”

“Did she see the body?”

“Orenda? She insisted. I did the best I could to hide the damage, but it was never going to be easy for her.”

He thought of Orenda’s brittle composure the day before, her tears at the lake and of Khamsin Il’harren, standing on the steps to a temple long ago. ‘Don’t weep,’ his mother had said. ‘In this one thing let me be proud of you.’ Her expression hadn’t flickered.

His own face must have changed because Imrael frowned and reached out to take his hand. “Does something hurt?”

“No. I’m fine,” he said hurriedly as though repetition would make it true. Imrael leant in anyway to  examine his fingers more closely, tracing over his palm like a cartographer poring over a map.

“Good. You were lucky; mild frostbite and some nasty scrapes but nothing I couldn’t fix. Don’t scare me like that again.”

Khazri pulled away and let his hands fall into his lap, unsure what else to do with them. His nails were chipped and broken, but the scrapes from the ice had healed to thin pale lines. He could only hope it hadn’t cost Imrael too much. “Thank you,” he said, looking everywhere but at Imrael’s face.

“It’s nothing.” Imrael waved a hand dismissively. “Tea?”

“Please. You said you examined the corpse?”

“Wyne,” Imrael corrected, setting the kettle over the fire. “I had a look. No time for anything thorough and the cold confuses things but I’d say he’s been in the water about two days which lines up with when he was reported missing. No signs of a struggle and he bled out rather than drowned. The cut to the throat was clean, made with a straight blade, but that’s all I can tell you. The town’s in an uproar; there hasn’t been a murder here in living memory.”

“Oh.” The news shouldn’t have disappointed him. Had he really expected anything else? Wasn’t one dead child enough?

Imrael gave him a shrewd look. “You think this goes further than Wyne though, don’t you?” he said, shoving Jeff out of the way so that he could sit back down. “When you turned up you kept talking like he wasn’t the only one you found.”

Khazri wrapped his arms around the dog. “I was confused.”

“That doesn’t mean you were wrong.” He indicated the lumpy, leatherbound book. “While you were sleeping I took a quick look through some of the records in here. Hilda Olsdotter.”

“Who?”

“Lived in town. Eight years ago she was eleven. She went ice fishing around midwinter and didn’t come home.”

“Shit.” That had been his first winter on the surface, the longest and cruelest he’d experienced until now.

“Mmhm. Another girl, Faline, went missing a decade before that. She was older and she’d been talking of leaving for the Dawnwood Militia, so there wasn’t much of a search. I did some cross referencing and it corresponded with some trouble with the herds. A disease or something.”

“...And before that?” He asked because he had to.

“A boy called Derian. Local troublemaker going by the records. He’d run away before.”

Khazri wished he wouldn’t give their names. “How far back did you look?”

“Far enough. You were right about this place.” The kettle screamed.

“They could all be in on it,” Khazri said as Imrael got up. “You can’t trust anyone with this.”

Imrael measured out pine needles into a pair of earthenware mugs. “Do you still think it was Orenda?”

“Not necessarily. I was…” _Projecting_. “Jumping to conclusions.”

“We shouldn’t start with too many assumptions.” Imrael pressed the cup into Khazri’s hands, their fingers brushing as he steadied it. “It would help more if I had something sweeten this with but...” He gestured helplessly.

“It’s fine.” Khazri balanced the cup on one knee, not trusting the strength or steadiness of his hands. Imrael kindly declined to comment though he could hardly have failed to notice.

While it cooled Khazri picked at a loose thread hanging from the sleeve of his shirt. It was his own, but not the one he’d been wearing last night. Logically he knew they’d had to change his clothes for dry ones, half remembered it happening, but the thought made him uncomfortable in a way he couldn’t articulate. He trusted Imrael as much as he trusted anyone and that was not enough to allow for being naked and helpless in his care.

He shifted and something pressed against his side. One of his knives in its sheath, tucked in beside him like a doll with a sick child. Perhaps Imrael was a better friend than he deserved.

“I can’t understand why this is happening,” Imrael said at last. “Why kill children? If you’re right about this being religiously motivated why not, I don’t know, a cow?”

Khazri sipped his tea, hoping the cup would hide his expression. “It’s not the death that’s offered but the life that could have been. What’s a cow ever going to achieve? Who’d mourn one?” The crueler answer was that he doubted this town had a cow to spare.

“If it’s about potential, Wyne seems a strange choice. I’m not saying he won’t be missed, but-” Imrael stopped, choked off by the demands of propriety.

“Cripples, troublemakers and bastards,” Khazri continued for him. “Those whose loss won’t be felt too keenly.” He shrugged. “Sometimes the Gods are shortchanged. Sacrifice isn’t easy.” He spoke the words precisely, like handling knives. One slip was enough to cut.

Imrael frowned at him. “You talk about it so lightly. I’ve heard- Do your people- I’m sorry, that’s probably insensitive.”

“Yes.” Khazri closed his eyes and let his head fall back. “We do.” The fire snapped and hissed like something alive. “There are lots of ways. And not always children. It depends on the God being honoured. The knife is used most often but sometimes they burn or drown or strangle.” His voice didn’t sound like his own, detached and lecturing. Both the dogs had raised their heads to look at him and he felt the beginnings of a growl rumbling in Jeff’s throat.

“That’s awful,” Imrael said softly and Khazri felt a sudden stab of anger. There were cracks running through him from the weight of his failures and Imrael sat there blinking his pretty eyes and judging like it was simple. Like Gods and honour and family could be dismissed with one small word.

Knives could cut both ways. “In Zalach’ann, under the Lady’s temple, they keep the spiders sacred to her. They’re the size of horses and beautiful, all iridescent. Like jewels. The Lady does take children; she’s the greatest of our Gods and deserves the highest honour. Every sixty four years we celebrate the Lady’s Feast. All the noble houses makes an offering.” Spite lent him eloquence and he didn’t stumble over the words.

“Khazri-” Imrael was smart, maybe he knew where this was going, but Khazri didn’t care, talked over him. Your pain could be a weapon if you used it right.

“You want to understand don’t you? _Listen_. I was thirteen and it was an honour. I was a bastard got off a whore. There was no chance of a good marriage; what else was left? I wanted to be worthy of our name. I thought I could be strong. Like my mother. I wasn’t.”

“You ran away?” Imrael sounded almost hopeful.

“No. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t choose. I went to the temple with the other- the other offerings. Some of them cried. I didn’t. I wanted my mother to be proud.” He stopped to draw a breath, held it, let it go. “Spiders have children too. They need to eat. You know how that works?” He forced a smile, made it ugly, and was rewarded with a flinch.

“I know.”

Both dogs were whining, awful and monotonous, but they weren’t snapping as they had the night before. Then they had been angry. Now they were afraid.

“Before they hatch you can hear them moving inside. It takes a week. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Mine were slow I think, they took too long but the others- I couldn’t see what happened, it was over my face, the webbing was.” His hair was tickling his ears and he brushed it back, tugging harder than he needed to. “But I could hear- The venom meant no screams and I was so glad they couldn’t, that I couldn’t- A-and the smell. I couldn’t breath but I could still smell the- the I don’t know how to describe it.”

“Deliquescence, perhaps,” Imrael said, like it was terribly important to find the right word. He blanched. “I’m sorry, I don’t- That’s not important. You survived.” Khazri could see the horror he wanted from him but also a terrible sympathy that drew the words from him like venom from a wound.

“She- I don’t know, the Lady must have known I wasn’t worthy and- My cousin. Gilavar. They...ate the others first and he came for me before they- Not for me, but I think he wanted to make a point. I was convenient, I don’t know. He might have died for that. He probably did.” His fingers were tangled in his hair again, pulling enough to hurt. He forced himself to let go.

“Your cousin saved you,” Imrael prompted when Khazri didn’t continue, his voice too neutral.

“I woke up afterwards. Outside the city there are tunnels. I don’t remember, I wasn’t well, the venom...But I didn’t go back. My family could be ruined and it’s my fault but I couldn’t- I ran. I should be- It’s been eight years and I’m still not-” The anger that had kept him talking was burnt out and he was only tired now. Out of words. He didn’t resist as Imrael curled an arm around him, drawing him over so that his forehead was pressed against his chest. He was nauseous and shaking but his eyes were dry - he had strength enough for that. After everything, he was still his mother’s son. “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know who the apology was meant for.

“You shouldn’t be,” Imrael said. “None of it should have happened. None of it was your fault.”

“You don’t understand.” He didn’t want to have to argue the wrongness of what he’d done or failed to do. He didn’t want Imrael to make him defend them as he had to himself a hundred times before.

“No. No, I don’t.” Imrael shifted and Khazri could picture his face, bright and focused like he could debate everything better. He almost laughed. “You said sacrifices weren’t supposed to be easy. Well they can’t have it both ways. If they chose a child because they thought he didn’t matter then that wasn’t really a sacrifice, was it? That’s just superstitious murder.”

“The Gods-”

“Can go fuck themselves. Whatever they are, they can go choke on a dick.”

Khazri did laugh at that, nervous bordering on hysterical, and it broke the tension. They didn’t speak again while he pulled himself together, timing his breathing to the rise and fall of the cloth beneath his cheek. He’d never cared for the smell of Imrael’s cigarettes but it was something safe to focus on, years and miles distant from the acid-sweet stink of spider bile and necrotizing flesh.

He pulled away as soon as he could manage it and smoothed down his hair, too drained even to feel embarrassed. “So what do we do?”

“Well. You have a choice now,” Imrael said at last. His eyes were bright in the firelight and his smooth skin was blotchy as though from fever. Khazri dared not imagine his own appearance. “What do you want to do?”

“For Wyne?” He didn’t think that was entirely what Imrael meant but it was the easier question to answer. “It shouldn’t be kept secret. The town should know what happened. And why.” That much he was sure of. The rest could wait.

“Well. Dawn is still hours off and you should get some more rest until then.” Imrael started to get his feet. Hesitated. “Do you want me to stay?” There was a gentleness in his voice that cut deeper than scorn.

“I’m not a child,” Khazri snapped. “I’ll be fine. _Am_ fine.”

“Alright, I’ll head back to the room then. You can nod off to the soothing sounds of me falling over furniture in the dark.”

“Take Beryl,” Khazri said. “Just in case.” The killer was still out there after all. The dog lifted her head at the sound of her name and he knew she’d do what was needed.

“Sleep well. Call out if you want-”

“Go to bed. _Please_.” Sympathy was sweet but too much would choke him and he didn’t know how to ask for anything else.

The hall seemed larger once Imrael had left. Any sense of catharsis was gone and he only felt foolish, more a child than ever. If Imrael had ever respected him before then that was done with now. As a doctor he might feel it was his duty to tend to every scraped knee and lend an ear to the most maudlin self-indulgence but Khazri ought to be a better friend than that.

Jeff laid his head in his lap and whined until Khazri scratched him behind the ears. He loved the dogs and they loved him but it was an uncomplicated affection. He helped them hunt and picked the burrs from their coats and it made no difference to them if he’d betrayed his family, if he was a coward or an apostate. Was it selfish to want anything more? Warm hands on his, the smell of smoke and antiseptic, a voice tight with fear - real fear - to see him hurt. _He would have stayed, if you’d only asked._

He pushed the thought aside. That was a question he was no more fit to deal with right then than the matter of the Lake. He kicked aside the covers and curled up with his back to the fire and the dog’s warm bulk pressed against him, canine snores rattling in his ears. Tired as he was, it took a long time for sleep to find him.

***

Once they had him, his dreams were reluctant to let him go. Water, bones and scuttling things - only the water was new. He slept through the sunrise, through fire being rekindled beside him and the benches being dragged out and the table set for breakfast. It was Jeff’s teeth closing on his ear that finally drew him to the surface.

He groaned and made a groggy attempt to swat the dog away before realising why Jeff had woken him. People talking, sotto voce, further down the hall. The instinct to spy went deep and so he patted his friend, wiped the worst of the drool from his ear and feigned sleep.  

“-and I have room enough,” said a woman, deep and rumbling. Avery, he thought.  

“I don’t want charity.” Orenda, sharply. She must have come to see Esma. Or her son’s corpse.

“Charity has nothing to do with it. In times like this we need to draw together. We need to look after our own.”

“Do you think I want help _now_? A week ago my son was still alive and if someone had done something then-”

“We did all we could. The winter’s been hard on everyone.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” Orenda’s boots rapped against the floorboards, moving closer to where he lay. Jeff was up in a moment, his fur puffing out in warning. Khazri sat up more slowly, blinking sleepily, hoping he looked more innocent than he felt. He’d have kicked the covers back, ready to flee or fight, but that would expose the knife Imrael had left him. he gripped the hilt, drawing what comfort he could from it.

“I’m sorry,” he said in place of a greeting.

“Who did it?” Her eyes shone obsidian black, sharp and brittle.

“I don’t kn-”

“ _Who_? What do I have to give to get their name?” Yesterday’s grief was gone, swallowed up by fresh-kindled fury and he feared what she might do.

“N-nothing. If I knew I’d tell you.” That was the truth. He didn’t know. He guessed and that wasn’t close to good enough.

“I suppose.” she said, suspicious. “I suppose you kept your end of it. Why though? I never thought you’d risk your life. You didn’t know him.”

He didn’t want to. It was easier to see a prop in a reenactment of a play eight years old than to think on a little boy who had wanted to be a dragon. The life unlived was more ghastly than the corpse had been but Wyne had been as real as he was.

“I didn’t do it for Wyne,” he said. “But I should have. I’m sorry I didn’t know him.”

Orenda’s jaw clenched and she turned away without a word.

Khazri waited until she’d left and then, slowly, relaxed his grip upon the knife.

***

“I ought to have you arrested,” Esma told him over breakfast. The hall was emptier than it had been the night before but still felt overfull to Khazri. Friends, retainers, servants, he couldn’t tell, exhaustion turned them into a blur of blocky human faces. “I would have done it last night, but your friend insisted you couldn’t be moved. You’d better have a damned good explanation for what happened.”

He groped for some half-truth but Imrael spoke first, launching into an impassioned and somewhat embroidered account of the previous evening’s activities. Khazri had, he learnt, been scant inches from death, horrifically injured while valiantly striving to bring closure to a grieving family, rescued in the nick of time by Imrael’s implausible medical skills. Of their suspicions, or the story Khazri had told, nothing was said and he was grateful.

“He can speak for himself, can he not?” Esma said, interrupting a gruesomely detailed account of thawing and reattaching fingers lost to frostbite.

“It went as he said,” Khazri mumbled, wrapping his hands around another mug of tea with a wince of sympathy for his imaginary self. Beneath the table, Beryl butted against his leg supportively and he leant down to stroke her muzzle.

“I tell it better,” Imrael said flippantly.

Esma frowned at him. “What story will you tell to his Lordship, Master Sovelin?”

“Imrael, please.”

“Imrael then. Do you think this will make for a gripping tale?”

“I’m not a bard, ma’am. I’ll give him the plain facts of what’s happening here and he will act.”

“See that he does.” She pushed back from the table and strode from the hall.

“Well that went well,” Imrael said with a grimace. “How are you feeling today? You should really eat something.” He indicated the tureen of watery stew being passed down the table, the last of the deer he’d shot the day before thickened with millet. Jeff was following hopefully in its wake. He didn’t want to eat but it might help the lightheadedness that still lingered from the night before and who knew when he’d get another chance. Imrael would not have brought it up if he had not already seen that those with a greater need were fed.

“Fine. Thanks,” he said, accepting a bowl. He smiled as brightly as he could manage and wiggled his fingers to demonstrate how attached they all were. “In one piece.”

“And...the rest? Khazri, if you ever want to talk about-”

“No.” He’d been a fool to say as much as he had. He took a mouthful of the soup to avoid having to speak further; it was hot but that was all he could say for it.

To Imrael’s credit, there was barely an awkward pause before he changed the subject. “So what do we do now?” He leant in to ward against eavesdroppers, distractingly close and dangerously obvious to anyone who cared to look. “I thought I might go back through the archives, try to cross reference the deaths with the census, see if there are any families that keep coming up. The records aren’t very complete and it’s hardly conclusive but it’s a place to start.”

“It’s a good idea.” Khazri nudged Beryl with his knee, set his ears back and flicked a glance in Jeff’s direction. She stretched, clambered to her feet and then launched herself across the hall towards her brother with a yowl.  

“And you?” Imrael asked, leaning closer to be heard over the snarls. Every head but his had turned to watch the fight and they were unobserved. “I’m just going to assume staying in bed and recovering from almost dying is out of the question.”

“It is,” Khazri said, tilting his teacup so that the pine needles in the bottom danced and whirled. He’d started this the way one picked at the scab over an unhealed wound. He’d known he would find a bloody mess beneath but now he’d started it would be more painful to stop.

“You could talk to the Headwoman. She likes you better and with her help...”

Asking a Yashethin lord, already resented, to pass judgement on a friend, a relative for following the town’s old ways. “That won’t end well.”

“Perhaps not.” Jeff and Beryl had drawn one of the hounds into the fray and several people were trying to separate them with a broom. “But I don’t see what we can do alone. If it’s more than one person behind it, if there’s some sort of cult-”

“It’s not the people I’m worried about.” It was. Before last night he could pretend that he only sought the truth but now he had it he needed to decide what to do with it. Decide, when everything he’d been raised to believe told him otherwise, if what they’d done was wrong.

Instead he said, “it’s in the lake. Or is the lake.”

“The god?” Imrael rummaged under the table for his bag and came up with his tobacco pouch and a scrap of paper.

“I saw it.”

“After you fell in? The shock of the cold-”

“I saw it.”

“Alright then,” Imrael said mildly, slim fingers moulding a pinch of tobacco. “ _Is_ the lake? Some sort of genius loci?”

“I don’t know.” The soup was gone though he scarcely remembered eating it and he could hear the dogfight winding down.

“Hmph. I suppose it doesn’t matter,” said Imrael. He finished rolling the cigarette and a snap of his fingers set it alight. He exhaled a cloud of fragrant smoke, savouring it or savouring the effect - he did have a flare for the dramatic. “How would you like to kill it?” he said.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter art by [Callum Stannard](http://callumstannard.com/) (in which Imrael's hat is like 90% less terrible than described) and I'm on tumblr in the [obvious place](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com/)!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should probably put a warning here, skip to the end for a list of potential triggers.

_Khazri had never wanted to learn to fight. It wasn’t proper and when would he ever need to? Dancing was more fun and didn’t leave him covered in bruises but he loved his cousin and so he came, whenever Gilavar called, to the practice yard._

_Vrix, who was the Il’harren master at arms, would give them wasters and gambesons and watch them spar, correcting a grip, pointing out sloppy footwork. Khazri thought there was something mocking in her smile, in the easiness with which she had acquiesced to Gil’s demand for training but he never brought it up._

_The soldiers would snigger and make comments about sword strokes and stamina that, at eleven, he only barely understood. Tehaneth and his friends would stalk past, rolling their painted eyes, and Cierza would fight Gil and lose so ostentatiously that none of the onlookers could doubt she’d thrown the bout._

_It wasn’t so bad though, until the day his mother came to discuss guard rotations._

_Khazri froze at the sight of her - Gil almost took his head off - and cast about for an escape route or, failing that, some way to hide the sword and armour before she noticed._

_“Get your blade back up,” Gil snapped and Khazri did so, but his attention stayed with her. He made more of a fool of himself than usual and, after the fourth time Gil had rapped his knuckles and knocked his sword from his grip, he was ready to flee and damn the consequences._

_“Nephew. What are you doing?” Khamsin watched with Vrix, head tilted, a frown pricking at her forehead._

_Gilavar spun - he was very fast when he wasn’t holding back for Khazri’s sake - and came to rest with his sword pointed at her chest._

_“Training,” he said._

_“For what?” Her frown deepened into something closer to a scowl. “Shall I give you a lesson?”_

_“By all means.” He stabbed her. Or tried to. Her blade snapped up to cover, faster than thought. He disengaged and danced back then darted in with another blow. She blocked again; her sword wasn’t a training weapon and if she struck back she’d kill him. Knowing Gil, he didn’t care._

_She let him try her defenses until he was snarling, his hair come loose, his forehead sheened with sweat. And then came a blow that he overextended on, that brought his arms out too straight. She stepped in, hooked one arm about his elbows pinning them together while a twist of her hilt to lever the sword from his grasp. He hissed and she kicked his legs out from under him._

_“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. These games are a waste of Master Vrix’s time and of your own. And the boy’s.”_

_“My mother-”_

_“Is dead. If you wish to know how to defend yourself, there is some merit in that. But this playing at being a warrior is foolish and unseemly. What you do is your father’s business but my boy will be taught better than that.”_ _She drew a knife from her belt and held it out to him “Hide it in your sleeve, your hair. Get close, catch them off guard. Be smart.”_

_Gil took the knife and for a moment Khazri thought he’d try to stab her again. She must have too, judging by her stance; relaxed, balanced on the balls of her feet. But his cousin threw down the knife, spat and stalked away._

_“I pity the woman that has to bring_ that _to heel,” said Vrix._

_His mother shrugged. “Boy. Pick up the knife.”_

_He went scrambling for it, snatching it up so quickly he grazed his knuckles on the yard’s dirt floor. He held it awkwardly, at arm’s length._

_“There are a hundred ways to lose a knife fight, boy,” she said. “And only one to guarantee your survival. Learn to run.”_

***

The obelisk was only a mile from town. It sat proud upon its jut of shore, base sunk deep into the naked earth. The icy skeletons of weeds clung to the grey rock, and the engravings were obscured by frost. It was more than a bowshot from the woods across empty, stony ground so no chance of them being sniped or caught unawares and the causeway would serve as a chokepoint. It would have to do.

Imrael, after a few false starts, remembered enough of the words of an old farming charm to warm the earth enough for them to dig, Khazri breaking the softening soil into manageable chunks and Imrael shoveling it aside. Khazri didn’t ask why a city doctor knew such a spell - at a guess Imrael had learnt it before they set out in the hope it would let him help some struggling farmer sow a winter crop. It was exactly the kind of naïve, thoughtful thing he’d do.

Not entirely recovered from the night before, he had to stop to rest more than he would have liked. “This seems a roundabout method of deicide,” he said during one such halt.

“I may have exaggerated how effective this will be,” Imrael said, leaning on his spade. He was breathing heavily and there was a smear of dirt across the bridge of his nose. “This stone is ah...shall we say a focus for the lake’s followers. Probably. If we think of the trappings of worship as an exoskeleton built up around an invertebrate, destroying the obelisk is like plucking a snail from its shell.” Imrael paused. “I have a friend who thought that was where we get slugs from but experimental surgery shows that you just end up with a dying snail.”

“Are you making this up as you go along?”

“I prefer to say ‘falsifying a hypothesis’.” Imrael grinned. “No, you’re right, I have no idea what I’m doing but whatever it is I can’t imagine it will do this thing any good.”

Khazri leant across and swiped the worst of the dirt from his face with a gloved finger.“You’re lucky you’re pretty.”

Imrael rearranged his features into a grotesque parody of a pout but dropped the expression just as quickly. “What will we do if they try to stop us?” he said.

Khazri shrugged and dug his pickaxe in the soil with a crunch like breaking bone. He still hadn’t decided but perhaps they’d make it easy for him.

“We can’t kill them,” Imrael said. “We can’t just up and start executing people. There’s been enough here of people taking lives into their own hands.”

“I thought you said Wyne mattered.”

“He did. All people do. Deciding that sometimes they don’t is what started all this.”

“ _They_ started it.”

“And it ends here. I’m not saying not to defend yourself. Just promise me we’ll try to talk. Promise me you won’t kill them if you don’t have to. We have to be better than them.”

“I’ll try,” he said at last. Imrael beamed and Khazri’s insides lurched. _Will you die for that smile?_

He quashed the thought and swung the pick again, dividing his attention between the burn in his arms as the tool bit the earth and watching for anyone’s approach along the path.

It took longer than he’d thought before he heard booted feet crunching across the stone. Six in all, but only three of them women. They were all older, as far as he could reckon such things, none of them younger than forty with faces weathered by time and hardship. Only some of them had armour which was fortunate since he only had a hunting bow and no bodkin points. Their weapons were a random assortment; a hatchet, a boar spear, a couple of swords. Avery the blacksmith was there with a great hammer taken from the forge in her hands but most concerning was the man with Esma’s old crossbow. Khazri could likely kill any of them individually, but he doubted he was a match for them all.

He dropped the pick and plucked an arrow from his quiver, sighting along it without drawing his bow to its full extension. The air was still and though he might not get them all, he thought he could drop three or four before they made it to the cover of the woods. But he had promised away the first shot and he’d not break his word, though it might be the death of them.

“Only the six of you? That’s not much of a cult,” Imrael called.

“What are you doing, Elf?” Avery bellowed back. The townsfolk walked and kept walking towards them, picking their way over the rocks of the causeway, closing the distance between them.

“Landscaping. Ancient brooding monoliths are a bit passé right now, don’t you think? You could have a nice gazebo here instead with a view of the lake. It’d be lovely in the spring.” Imrael never could keep quiet when he was nervous.

“Step away.”

“Do you know, I don’t think we will,” Imrael said, his voice ringing cold and clear across the ice.

“Why are you doing this?” Avery said, a note of distress in her voice that sounded genuine. “The price is paid, the town will survive. It’s over.”

“Is it really? Funny thing about seasons; they’re seasonal. What happens next time there’s a cold snap?” For someone who claimed they wanted a peaceful solution, Imrael was doing a piss poor job of negotiating. Some people couldn’t help but pick at scabs.

“I have a duty to my town,” Avery said flatly. The townsfolk had spread out behind her, forming a loose semicircle pinning him and Imrael against the stone with the lake at their backs

“We have a duty to see this ended. Surrender and you’ll come with us to Dawnwood to face his Lordship’s judgement.”

“What right does he have to judge us? What right do you? We didn’t matter when we were starving, why should he care now? We had no choi-”

“Wyne.” Khazri found his voice. “Wyne had no choice.”

“One child against a town-”

“Say his name,” Khazri said and pulled the bowstring taut.

“So that’s how it’s going to be? If you don’t help us then it was all for nothing. His sacrifice was in vain.”

“It wasn’t a sacrifice. He didn’t matter to you. It didn’t mean a thing.” He spoke the words and knew them to be true.

“Just walk away, boy. Help us. Be the hero.”

He wanted to. His hands ached with how tightly he was gripping the bow and it was all he could to to keep it steady. He wasn’t afraid to fight, to die even, so much as he was afraid to choose and choose badly.

But he already had, when he followed the kelpie out onto the ice. Before then even, when he’d stood before the obelisk and known why Wyne had died and refused to let it rest.

“No,” Khazri said. “You were wrong. All of you.”

His arm burnt with the strain. If he was to have any chance, he would have to take them quickly, before weight of numbers brought him down. The only problem with that was the crossbow aimed between his eyes. He was fairly sure he was fast enough to dodge it. _Bet your life?_

Perhaps he wouldn’t need to. Imrael had gone quiet and glancing to the side Khazri recognized that out of focus look he got when he began a spell.

The crossbow string broke, the frayed ends snapping like snakes, and he loosed his own shot.

He’d held it too long and his aim was bad, taking Avery in the meat of her upper arm. She cursed and clutched at it but did not fall. He snatched up another arrow, drew back and let it fly to take the axeman in the throat as he raised it towards Imrael.

And then the first of them was on him and there was no more time. He dropped the bow and slipped a knife from the sheath at his hip. It was no match for the man’s sword, but then a human was no match for even the least of his people. Five might be though.

The man hadn’t learnt to hide his tells; he tensed before he swung and it was easy to lean back out of the way of his first strike. And he was afraid, too tentative to press the advantage his reach gave him without his companions to back him up.

Khazri wasn’t about to wait for that and he had backup of his own.

The dogs broke from the woods behind them, tongues lolling as they raced across the snow and Khazri’s opponent almost turned to look, then checked himself.

Too slow though. It was more than long enough for Khazri to step inside his guard where there was no room for a sword to count for anything. The man realised and let the weapon go, his hand starting for a knife, but Khazri’s own was already buried in his chest. He stabbed twice more for good measure then spun with the spasming body and shoved it in the direction of the swordswoman who’d been sprinting to his aide. He didn’t have time to look back, but it sounded like they both went down.

The man with the broken crossbow had dropped it and closed the distance, his thrust almost catching Khazri in the side. He slipped around it and caught the extended arm with his free hand. The man pulled back and as his leg straightened Khazri stamped down on his knee. The ligaments snapped with a crack that echoed across the ice and the scream that followed was no quieter.

That left three. The dogs had corralled the spearwoman away from the rest of the fight and he could only hope they held their own. He spared a glance for Imrael, pressed back against the obelisk and hopefully not a target.

There was movement behind him and he threw himself forwards, not fast enough and something sliced across his back. Too fast for pain, but he could feel the cut gape open and blood seeping into his clothes. _A fleshwound. Keep moving._ The swordswoman, who had won free of her dying companion quicker than he’d hoped.

The man with the ruined knee caught at Khazri’s leg, whether through design or in blind agony, and it was a struggle to turn the woman’s next blow aside. His arm rang with the force of it and he kicked backwards at the man behind him, felt something crunch beneath his boot. Maneuverability was his only advantage and he would reclaim it or die. The man’s grip slackened and Khazri threw himself backwards, beneath the next swing of her sword.

The air rang with the iron reek of blood, his own and other peoples’, and the stink of water rising off the lake was almost thick enough to choke him. Voices were chanting, Imrael’s and Avery’s, but he didn’t have time to consider what they might be casting, barely had time to hop back to avoid another blow.

He coughed, couldn’t catch his breath, coughed again and water spilled into his mouth, icy cold and redolent of rot. _Lakewater, no, no, a spell break it you fool you-_

The woman’s sword caught him in the side and he went down hard, all the breath knocked from him. The blow should have split him open but there was no blood, just the crushing, bruising pain of being hit with an iron bar. Imrael must have spelled the sword blunt and Khazri had never been so grateful for what felt like broken ribs.

He tried to rise but dropped back to his knees retching, thin black fluid splattering the ground, strings of weed and tiny flopping fish. Avery’s chanting was louder, thrumming against his eardrums like water pressure.

The woman kicked him in the side - perhaps not willing to trust her ensorcelled sword again - and he went limp, curled around her leg and slashed up under her mail hauberk because drowning was no excuse for giving up - what would his mother say? Blood spurted hot across his face and with a giddy surge of triumph he knew he’d hit the artery. She clutched at the wound, sword falling into the snow beside her. She looked like she was moaning but he couldn’t hear her above the water in his ears. Then her lips stopped moving and so did she.

One of the dogs yelped in pain, but there was nothing Khazri could do to help. His world had narrowed to the pressure in his lungs and the mineral tang of water filling his nose and mouth. He swallowed weakly and scratched at the ice beneath ( _above?_ ) him and wondered if he’d ever left the lake.

Avery stood over him, his arrow jutting proud from her shoulder. He still had a knife if he could get his arm to move but then so did she. It was bronze and ancient, verdigris swathing the blade like waterweed. “You brought this on yourself,” she said, raising it left handed.

His vision was spotted grey but Khazi forced himself to look as the knife came down, brought his own blade up to meet hers but slowly, too slowly-

Imrael hit her with the shovel. “I’m so sorry!” he said as she crumpled, knife rattling against the stones.

The pressure in his lungs abated enough for him to draw one rattling, waterlogged breath.

“Finish her,” he coughed as Imrael rolled him over onto his side.

“Stop trying to sit up, you may have broken ribs and if you aggravate-”

Khazri shrugged him off. “It’s not over you idiot-”

She had gained her feet while he was still struggling to his knees. No time for weapons and her punch knocked him to the ground, rattling his head against the stones. Her full weight came down on his chest, one hand clutching for his throat, the other groping for the knife she’d lost.

He sank his teeth into her wrist, hanging on like a dog, and she roared in pain. Imrael caught for her free arm but she shrugged him off as easily as batting away a fly. The distraction was enough though. He hooked his leg over hers and twisted, breaking her balance and tumbling her off him. (Gilavar had taught him that; ‘if a woman ever tries to hurt you,’) He didn’t have the strength to pin her, but he caught at the arrow still in her arm and pressed down, felt the vibrations as it grated against bone.

“Yield,” he rasped, more a breath than a word.

Her knee caught him in his injured ribs. He ignored the burst of pain and the sudden loss of breath, so far past caring. He was snarling and blood had washed the taste of the lake from his mouth. He didn’t remember drawing another knife, but one was in his hand nonetheless, and he put it to her throat. ‘One child against a town,’ she had said. ‘We had no choice,’ and he didn’t think he’d ever wanted to kill anyone so badly.

But he’d sworn to spare them if he could.

“ _Yield_.”

And at last she did.

It took a long moment to register that the fight was done, his muscles locked, ready for the killing blow. And then Imrael was nudging him aside so that he could bind her hands and check her wounds.

“She’ll survive,” he said, cleaning bloody hands on the snow. “What about you?”

“Me?” Khazri said stupidly. The aftermath of violence left him unable to be still, jittering in pointless circles on legs almost too shaky to support him.

“I need to check your ribs. Take your shirt off and let us hope that the next time we do this it’s not because of a medical emergency.”

There was blood in his mouth, not his own, and every breath hurt. Laughing hurt more, but he did it anyway. It turned into a cough. He could feel something grinding in his chest and spat blood and water. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

Imrael tutted and pulled up his shirt to press cold hands to his side. “This might hurt.” Exertion and injury had left his skin fever-hot and the touch was almost pleasant until Imrael pressed down. Bone slid and shifted beneath his fingers and then he felt the tingling burn of magic lacing his ribs back together. He hissed between his teeth but the pain faded quickly to an itch, like pins and needles down inside the marrow.

“Slow, deep breaths,” Imrael said, moving round to close the cut across his back. “And don’t try to suppress any coughing. Also don’t get clubbed again if you can help it.”

He followed Imrael about the battlefield looking for survivors - there was one other, the man with the ruined knee. He tried to crawl away as they approached only to freeze with a strangled scream. Four dead, one crippled; boy or not, his mother would be proud. Khazri backed off to let Imrael handle it and called the dogs back from their victory feast. Jeff was limping badly and Beryl had a long, messy gash along her side, but both were in good spirits. Imrael treated them, perhaps more gingerly than he had in the past and wouldn’t let them lick him as he stitched them back together. He hadn’t seen them kill before.

“Let me finish checking you over. Your face is a mess.”

“No time,” Khazri said. There was movement on the path leading from the town. Avery knew how to throw a punch and his left eye was already beginning to swell shut but with his right he could make out that people were approaching. He cast about for his bow and found it, the string dangling broken.

Esma was first to the end of the causeway, her battered crossbow in her hands. She pointed it at Khazri and if he’d thought he could dodge a bolt before, he certainly couldn’t now. He put the bow back down and brushed at his hair where it hung in his eyes, damp with gore and melted snow.

“What happened here? What have you done?” Esma spoke loudly, her voice echoing back to the townsfolk behind her. Khazri saw Orenda in the crowd, Breck and her dogs, Firman and other faces he recognized from around the town, names he’d never learnt. Some of them must have known even if they hadn’t come to the stone. Some of them must have approved.

“It was them!” Imrael cried. “They killed Wyne! And the others, Faline and Hilda and-”

Esma kept the crossbow trained on Khazri but it was Avery she looked to when she repeated, “what happened here?”

Avery said nothing. Her expression was contemplative as she turned to look at Khazri.

“Avery,” Esma said. “By the love you bore my mother-”

“Perhaps the elf is right. Perhaps we were wrong to keep it hidden. You’re the expert, eh?” she said to him, her eyes flicking from his face to his shoulder where the scar lurked beneath his clothes.

He shied from her gaze as Esma shied from her words. “How long has this been happening?” she said, her voice gone flat and colourless.

“Decades,” Imrael said. “There are records going back-”

“You be silent,” Esma said, not taking her eyes from Avery. “Did my mother know?”

The blacksmith shrugged. “You were too young to understand.”

“Did she know?” Her voice cracked like ice.

“She was a leader. She did what had to be done, however hard it was, whatever it cost her.”

“It will cost me to order your death, Avery.”

Avery grinned. One of her teeth had been broken in the fight. “Are you woman enough to pay?”

“I am my mother’s daughter,” said Esma. She pointed out across the lake. “Go. Go to your god.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Orenda said behind her. Her smile was an open wound in her dark face.

“The sacrifice has already been made,” Avery said. “The town will survive and your hands stay clean. This year. The time will come again and you will have to choose.”

“And I’ll choose better than she did. Go.”

“Your mother would be proud.” With her arms bound Avery moved awkwardly but she held her head up as she turned to face the lake. She walked proudly and did not look back.

“Esma,” Imrael said. “There has to be a better-”

“Be silent.”

They stood, in silence as commanded, while the figure got smaller. They listened to the ice groan and shift. They watched the ripples when she went under. She did not resurface. The kelpie would not go hungry after all, Khazri thought grimly.

He started back along the causeway, Imrael behind him. The ice was broken now, chunks of it floating on the waves lapping up over the stones, almost ankle deep.

He had barely noted how strange that was when the water began to seethe.

It rose and the Lake rose with it.

It was shell and stone and the skeletons of sunken ships. It was everything that had ever swum or scuttled across the lakebed; crabs and crayfish, pike and loach and newt. It had no eyes, no face, but a hundred mouths gaped open, drooling water, gnashing bony teeth. They’d believed in something cold and hungry and that was what had come.

It lurched towards them, dragging the water with it.

Several people screamed. Some ran. Some fell to their knees in fear or prayer. Firman held up his spear in shaking hands and Khazri almost started laughing again.

It reached the island first and the man whose leg Khazri had broken. Whatever Imrael had done for him hadn’t been enough, for he could only drag himself upon his hands. The Lake’s pincers closed about him and dragged him screaming towards one of Its mouths.

Esma fired her crossbow and her bolt sank into its body with a slurp and as much harm as water takes from a stone dropped into its depths. It scarcely seemed to notice - certainly it did not hesitate to close its jaws about its follower’s head. The screaming stopped.

“Mage! How do we kill it?” Esma cried. “How do we send it back?”

“How do you kill a lake?” Khazri said, clutching a knife though the Lady knew it would do them no good.

“Eutrophication?” Imrael’s voice was thin, almost hysterical.

“ _Imrael_!”

“It’s not the lake, it’s the idea of the lake. It’s the idea that we have to kill.”

“How?”

“I don’t- The stone? Yes! Topple the stone! That will destroy it!” Imrael’s words came surer as he spoke, drawing on that old, easy charisma for all that his voice shook.

“Silaluk, Irniq, get over here,” Esma shouted. “Pikatti, Breck! Help him.”

One of the people she’d called to - Silaluk? - ran on without breaking stride. The other three halted at her voice, caught between duty and survival.

“All of you! To the stone!” she shouted and her voice was a clarion call that they obeyed unquestioning. Those she’d called by name and some three others turned back to help them.

Sprinting back towards the obelisk, slipping and falling over icy rocks, Khazri looked back. The humans pushed onwards, knocking each other down, pulling each other up as they went. Jeff and Beryl ran with them - they weren’t stupid. But Khazri watched as the Lake began its feast.

It took its worshippers first, or at least those who knelt before it. The water churned around them, thick and black with sediment and other things, scummed with chunks of rosy ice.

Parts of it turned to regard him with the unseeing skulls of drowned things.

Cursing, he ran on to the island.

They had the shovel and the pickaxe, farming implements and Firman’s old spear for a lever. And they had fear, driving them harder than any whip. The dogs joined them, pawing dirt aside as they worked, hands blistering and nails cracking.

Still, the stone went deep and the ground was cold and they did not have time.

There were still people left on the shore, though most had scattered into the woods or already been taken. Orenda remained, picking up stones and hurling them at it with an awful, wrenching effort. It had always had its food from waiting, from storms and treacherous currents, and it was clumsy, crushing as many as it seized. It needed easier prey. And there they were trapped upon the island like fish in a barrel. It oozed towards them flexing claws, chelicerae, tentacles, appendages he didn’t have a name for.

“I’m sorry,” Imrael said dully. “I really thought this could work.”

“It still can. I’ll buy you time.” The Lake wasn’t used to hunting; it wanted to be fed. He cast about among the stones and there was the knife that Avery had dropped. He snatched it up.

“Khazri, don’t-”

Khazri ignored him, tugging his glove off with his teeth as he splashed back along the causeway towards the shore.

Orenda was still on the beach and he pulled up short beside her. He opened his mouth, said something urgent and incoherent, gesturing to the safety of the forest. She ignored him. He caught her sleeve and she pushed him off, hard enough that he stumbled, and so he let her be and ran on.

His grandmother would do something clever. His mother would do something brave. He was not bold or strong or wise but there was one thing he understood.

He was bleeding already but it wasn’t the blood that mattered. It was the sacrifice. It was the choice. And so he drew Avery’s knife across his palm - it was sharp and the skin parted easily. It scarcely even hurt.

Clenching his fist so that the blood welled faster, he spun and opened his hand, scattering fat little droplets. The water was knee deep and they pattered upon it like rain.

And it _worked_. The Lake, just for a moment, hesitated. Those mouths lapped by the water opened and closed, tasting the offering. It did not follow him but it paused in its advance towards the island.

But it wasn’t enough he realised as it turned away. He slashed the lacings on his bracer, let it drop, and shoved back his sleeve, baring his arm to the elbow. He cut again, pressing harder.

It stopped for longer. Parts of it slopped and groaned, tugging away from the main bulk of it towards him as though it were fighting an internal struggle. He wasn’t sure if it was intelligent enough to know what they were trying to do. Maybe Imrael was right, maybe all Gods were was lightning and maelstroms, blind, destructive power that needed a person’s will to drive them towards anything greater. Or maybe it was angry they’d killed its priestess. The difference was for Imrael to argue over with his academic friends. Whatever the reason, his blood wasn’t enough. It pulled itself back together, looming over the island.

He could see Imrael up to his knees in the hole, shovelling earth aside bare handed. Esma had her back to the stone, straining with all her might while Firman and Breck pressed down on the spear jammed beneath its base. One of them, a woman he didn’t know, looked up, broke and ran back for the shore. A pseudopod came whistling down and caught her in the back, knocking her beneath the surface. She didn’t come up again. There was too much silt for him to make out any blood.

Of course blood alone wouldn’t do it. Hadn’t he always known that?

It was Firman it snatched up next, catching him by the ankle. The old man flailed and hollered as it lifted him up even as Breck reached out to catch his hands but Esma screamed ‘keep digging!’ and pulled her away. Imrael had his hands spread as though to cast a spell but Khazri knew there was nothing he could do. The dogs had given up on digging entirely to snap at any piece of it that came too close.

Who were they to him really? Backwater peasants who’d called this on themselves. He might still drag Imrael to safety and the dogs could take care of themselves. He could walk away and pretend that this was justice. No one would expect more of him. But the truth of it was, it didn’t really matter who they were. It was who he was.

He made a choice. It was easier than he’d feared.

He put the knife to his wrist and cut deep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> T/W for self-harm, suicide, general violence.


	7. Chapter 7

_ “It would be easy to tell you that I had no choice,” said Khamsin Il’harren, eight years past. “But that would be a lie. I had a choice and I have made it.” _

***

No God could ignore a death offered in its name. 

He raised his hand and it came to him like a dog coming to heel. The blood dripped from his elbow in a steady rivulet; it tickled and he focused on that more than the pain. The strength ran out of him with it and he dropped to his knees as it grew closer in a gesture that looked too much like supplication. 

The water was as cold as it had been the night before, cold enough to slow the bleeding. He looked up at the God and smiled. 

“They’ve seen you now,” he said. “What you really are. They can’t pretend. Whatever you do, it’s over.”

If it heard him it gave no sign. A thing that was not a hand, though there were bones in it that might have come from one, reached out and wrapped itself around his bleeding wrist. A tongue. The grip was gentle but he lacked the strength to pull away. His arm throbbed, aches shooting through it with every beat of his heart. More tendrils reached out to touch his face and wind about his other arm, still clutching the bloody knife. It stank of everything that had ever died and rotted in its mud. 

He ignored it. He’d made the choice and would not flinch from it now. Icy mud crawled up over his thighs and and its grip closed about his throat, over his nose and mouth. 

He’d made a choice.

Something came down on the Lake’s limb, a chunk of broken spar, and it burst, scattering shells and pebbles and thin black mud. He flopped backwards, unbalanced, and Orenda stepped forward to stand over him, clutching the lump of driftwood like a spear. 

“Don’t,” he choked, spitting water, struggling to sit. “It’s alright. This is the plan.”

“Your plan,” Orenda said, looking up at her God. “Get gone, boy.”

“I have to-”

She rounded on him, slapped him hard across the face and then pulled him up by the collar. “Stupid brat, hasn’t it taken enough?”

He blinked at her, dumb with shock and blood loss. 

All the things the Lake had taken from her over the years and the little it had given back. A life with all the colour washed out. Of course she wouldn’t stand by and watch. _You selfish child, this was never_ your _tragedy._

She raised her spar in her right hand, dragging him with the other. He’d have fought against her but that would slow her further and it wasn’t her place to die here. He kicked against the stones, struggling to get his feet beneath him as the water drew back. Orenda was strong from years of hauling oars and nets but the undertow sucked at their feet so that they moved with all the slowness of a dream. 

Behind them, the Lake reared up, a hundred feet of churning mud and gaping, bottomless hunger, coming on with the heavy inevitability of a tidal wave. 

From far away he heard a shout and a great, grinding crash and then the Lake came thundering down over them both. 

***

“-can’t even go twenty four fucking hours without almost killing yourself, godsdammit Khazri what were you thinking?” It wasn’t the voice that woke him but a rhythmic tugging pinch at his right arm. 

“Wasn’t,” Khazri said or slurred, opening his eyes. Imrael had his wrist pinned across his lap, one hand pinching the gash together and a needle in the other. It didn’t hurt - a local anaesthetic, he assumed - and Khazri watched as his flesh pulled together, the minnow flash of metal darting in and through and out, drawing grey back over red. 

They were back from the lakeshore, on the outskirts of the woods where the high water had not reached, sat beside a huge fire that belched out smoke and heat in equal measure. The dogs were there, of course they were, serving as pillows for the second time that day. Their heads moved back and forth, following the needle’s movement - they were surprisingly calm given the amount of blood in the air. They really did like Imrael.

“What happened?” he said, sounding more coherent than he felt. “The Lake? The obelisk? Is Orenda well? The others?” 

“Try to keep still.” Imrael said, not looking up from his stitching. Khazri couldn’t have fidgeted even he’d wanted to - the lassitude of blood loss had set in and the injuries he’d taken in the fight before had stiffened and promised pain if he did other than obey. “The lake is back to being a body of water in the traditional sense, we split the stone and sank the pieces, lots of people are dead but it could have been worse. Orenda is fine and you will be too, thanks to her and no thanks at all to yourself.”

“I...had a plan.”

“She told me and if that’s your idea of a plan, you aren’t allowed to make one ever again.”

Khazri, lying supine, didn’t have a good view of Imrael’s face but his voice was strangely tight. “Are you alright?” he asked.

“I stopped the bleeding,” Imrael said, ignoring the question. “But there are so many others hurt that I couldn’t spare the magic for anything more. It will have to heal naturally. There’s probably going to be a scar.” He pulled the last knot tight and snipped the thread.

“I don’t mind.” It wasn’t as though it would damage his prospects any further. 

“Well I do.” Imrael layered bandages over the closed wound, down to his wrist and then over the shallower gash across his palm. “I have other patients to see to. Stay warm, make sure to drink-” he pressed a flask into Khazri’s good hand “-and if you feel another plan coming on, Beryl has promised to sit on you until it goes away.”

“That’s fair.” He reached up tentatively, with his uninjured arm, to stroke her muzzle. He was wrapped in Imrael’s coat; warm, too big and smelling faintly of cloves and iodine. Fumbling told him that there was a knife tucked into the pocket and he suppressed a smile. It was Avery’s from the shape of the handle and there were a lot of things he could read into that but he told himself it was a sign that Imrael trusted him still.

His wet clothes were propped beside the fire - so much for Imrael’s hopes - along with several humans, those too injured to limp back to Milcom. Turning his head he could make out others moving along the shoreline, picking through the detritus for anything edible left by the retreating water. 

“How many dead?”

“Twenty, give or take.” Imrael had moved further away than he’d realised and it was Esma that answered, from where she stood across the flames. “Some others might still turn up alive but with every hour that possibility shrinks.” How much further would their stores stretch now? “Perhaps it answered their prayers at the last,” she acknowledged with a wry curl of her lip. 

“I’m sorry it came to this.” 

“You brought it to this,” she said wearily. “You with your scheming and conniving - why didn’t you tell me what was going on? There were better ways to handle this.”

His mother wouldn’t have thought so and if Esma was at all clever she must see those opportunities too. Less pressure on their supplies, the cult wiped out and its God with it, and a chance to play the hero as her mother once had. This would be remembered and thirty years hence Milcom would tell stories of Esma the Just who had done battle with a God to defend her town. A Milcom that was safely Yashethin and had forgotten that a stone ever stood upon the island. 

“Perhaps,” he said. Beside him Jeff snorted and pressed a cold nose against his cheek. 

“I want you both gone, as soon as you’re well enough to travel.” 

“Of course.” She had every right to be angry. And, said the part of him that spoke with his grandmother’s cool voice, she doesn’t need extraneous protagonists to confuse her legend. Perhaps in thirty years it would not just be Gods but murdering fey she drove away. 

She’d make a strong leader. Maybe Milcom would survive. 

***

He managed, with Jeff’s help and significant discomfort, to approximate a sitting position, slumped sideways against the dog. His ribs hurt, as did the mostly-healed cut across his back, and he was battered and scraped from his fight with Avery but really he felt better than he had any right to. 

Someone - Irniq, he thought - was boiling up the results of the beachcombing in a bucket to make a crude stew. 

“Can I help?” he offered. 

Irniq looked him over, taking in his bandaged arm and battered face, his slumped posture, the mud and blood that plastered him head to toe, and frowned. “You can stir,” he said at last. 

Even if he was being patronized, he didn’t mind. Although he’d never done so in Zalach’ann - he had been a noblewoman’s son not a kitchen skivvy - he liked to cook. It was one of the few things he did now that was remotely appropriate for his sex. He sat close enough to the fire that the smoke stung his eyes and his damp hair steamed, glad of the excuse - Imrael’s coat and damp smallclothes only did so much against the cold. Another reason for Irniq to look at him strangely, no doubt. 

The soup, when it was done, was gritty with sand and fragments of shell but the the crayfish were fresh and sweet, better than the taste of blood that lingered on his tongue. By the time he’d finished he was feeling steady enough for Jeff and Beryl to leave him to comb the beach for their own meal, perhaps for fish but more likely for corpses. Human funerary rites, he thought, must come second to the business of survival and the dogs had the sense to be discreet about it. 

Alone, he limped over to Imrael with a second portion of soup. He was just finishing with what looked to be his last patient, a woman who’d had her thigh pierced by a piece of rotten wood as long as his arm. She showed Khazri the excised splinter with an enthusiasm that suggested a high dose of opiates. 

His own head was swimming by that point and he had to sit, as far from eavesdroppers as he could manage while ensuring they remained close to the fire. He had Imrael’s coat after all and would feel even guiltier if Imrael caught a chill because of it. “What made you think the stone would work? You weren’t sure before,” he said quietly as Imrael joined him.

Imrael began to lift a finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, realised how bloody his hands were and reconsidered. He wiped it on his trousers instead. “I wasn’t then. I made it up. The point was everyone believed it would work - how else can you kill a symbol but symbolically? Neat, eh?”

“You’re going to write a paper on this, aren’t you?”

“How could I not? Of course, it’s still only a theory; the stone could have been significant in some way I don’t understand. To come to any real conclusion - and to get published - we’ll need more data points.”

“You want to kill another one?”

“Do you think yours will die so easily?” Imrael sounded honestly curious but there was a cold, fierce light in his eyes, the sun caught on the edge of a blade. 

Khazri would not admit that he had been wondering much the same. He wasn’t sure if the idea was terrifying or comforting. “I didn’t take you for a crusader,” he said.

“Neither did I. It’s so easy not to think about it when it’s all theoretical. Or rather it’s easy to  _ think  _ about, it’s the feeling about it that’s the problem. Murdered children, people I- people bleeding out in the mud. It’s fucked up. We have to do better.”

“They’re not all monsters.”

“I don’t know how you can say that. You of all people.”

“We make the choices.”

“We do. Khazri, what you did-”

Khazri had known this was coming and shrugged the coat tighter about his shoulders. “Don’t. Please.”

“Are you going to tell me there was no other way?”

“No. There probably was. I just...I needed to know if I could.”

“If you  _ could-  _ Khazri, there are some things you don’t have to prove. You’re worth more than your death and fuck your family for thinking otherwise.”

“It wasn’t about them. Not just them. And I didn’t want to die. I was prepared to - I don’t think it would have worked otherwise - but…” He trailed off; he wasn’t convincing himself, never mind Imrael. “This isn’t helping, is it?” 

Imrael forced a smile. “It’s not exactly reassuring.”

“No. Um. I am glad you saved me.” 

“I think Orenda deserves most of the credit. But any time. I know it’s not about me but gods if you’d died I don’t know what I would have done.” Imrael ran his hands through his hair then picked up the bowl of soup. “Shit.” He put it down again. “You know I care about you, right?”

Khazri shrugged. Orenda had saved him for a debt and a grudge, Gilavar for spite and Moire for penance. “It’s your job. I’m sorry. I’ll be more considerate.”

“I’m not asking you to be less reckless because it makes more busywork for me - although it does so yes, please stop. I’m bringing it up because no one should be this unhappy. And because the medical establishment takes a dim view of flirting with patients.”

Khazri shrugged again, his shoulders twinging. “Alright,” he said, dry-mouthed.

“I know this isn’t the best time - actually I’m struggling to think of a worse one - but I think you should know.” Imrael leant forwards a little so that the firelight caught and reflected in his eyes. His hair had come loose again and fell about his face, black and glossy as the kelpie’s coat, where it wasn’t covered by that stupid hat. “You don’t have to say anything, I’m not expecting-”

“Your soup’s getting cold.” His head ached and he was as graceless and stupid and cowardly as ever. 

“Forget the soup. Khazri…”

“Then someone else will want it.” He stood, too quickly, and almost fell but he’d survived freezing, drowning and the wrath of Gods and he wasn’t about to let a little dizziness stop him. He snatched up the bowl, ignoring the spider-crawl of Imrael’s gaze at his back as he stumbled away.

The soup he gave to Firman, who had his ankle splinted and bandaged and was all too happy for an audience to his meandering tale of heroics. Khazri pretended to listen and tried not wonder at Imrael’s expression when he’d walked away. 

***

Sleep was the last thing he wanted, the last thing he’d thought himself capable of, but the old man’s voice was soothingly monotonous and his body demanded some recompense for all he’d put it through. He’d fallen into a waking dream in which Wyne stood behind him, trying to pass on something vitally important but only able to hiss and gurgle through his ruined throat, when Orenda’s fingers snapped before his eyes. The shadows had lengthened and the fire burnt down some but he had no idea how long she’d been standing there. Firman was gone and the only sound was the sucking hiss of waves against the shore. 

“Are you well? Do you need another clip about the ear?” she said. 

“Um. No, thank you.” Sometime over the past twenty four hours, it wasn’t hard to guess when, her image of him had changed from something fearsome and mysterious to an intractable child. He wasn’t sure which he preferred. 

“Good. I heard Esma; there won’t be time to teach you like you asked. I suppose fishing you out of the trouble you went and jumped in will have to do.”

“The debt is more than paid,” he said, wincing at how formal he sounded and then wincing again when his body protested the movement. “What will you do now?”

“We’ve had word from Milcom. When it fell, the waves tore up the docks and put holes in half the boats. There’s work to be done if we’re to be ready when the fishing season starts.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Come with us. To Dawnwood. Or anywhere.”

“What?” She stared at him. Bent and tired with dark hair greying even where the Lake had washed the ash away. But she was not so old as all that. 

“You could do better than this town,” he said. “Hasn’t it taken enough?”

“I have a child to mourn and there’s so much to rebuild,” Orenda said. Always it was easier not to change; the familiar pain was the easiest to bear. But she was braver than he. “Perhaps when the thaw comes…” She smiled, suddenly shy. “I have always wanted to see a dragon.”

They shook again; she was gentler this time for it was his injured hand he offered, needing the other for support. 

“Give the dragons my regards.”

“Take care of yourself, Elf.”

When she’d gone he staggered to his feet. His clothes were close enough to dry and he pulled them on, ignoring the dried mud that flaked off them, his injured hand fumbling with the fastenings. 

Take care? He grinned at himself. He’d been doing that for the past eight years, though it wasn’t physical hurts he was wary of. What kind of man was less afraid to engage in a knife fight or face a kelpie in its lair than to buy new clothes or admit to wanting...whatever it was that he wanted. 

He looked at Orenda’s retreating back then down at the colourless tatters of his cloak. He’d already told Imrael the worst there was to tell. He could be brave one last time. 

***

“Your coat.”

“Oh. Thanks,” Imrael said vaguely. He was stood on the shore skimming stones across the lake without any particular skill. “Decided it wasn’t your style? I’m glad; I was getting cold.”

“Sorry.” Khazri stood in silence, toying with a tangle of hair while Imrael pulled the coat back on and rearranged the lapels to his satisfaction. 

“Yes, well. Don’t you want this back?” He produced Avery’s knife from the pocket that Khazri had left it in. 

“Keep it. For your research.”

“I’m not a very knifey person,” Imrael said but he tucked the blade away again. “Ready to get back on the road? A couple of days rest would be sensible but I know better than to argue if you want to press on tomorrow.” He sounded resigned but not bitter and Khazri cursed himself for a fool. Imrael would never bring it up again and maybe that was for the best because why would he ever have wanted to-

“I owe you a drink.” He said it all in a rush then wished that he could take it back. It was almost worse than stepping out onto the ice, worse than putting the knife to his wrist.

“I know,” Imrael said. “I’d be drinking right now if you hadn’t run off with my brandy.”

“There was a kelpie.”

“That explains far less than you might think. Actually it just raises more questions. When? Where? Why?”

“It’s not important.” Khazri bent and picked up a stone of his own. A near perfect disk, silver-slick with frost and cold enough to burn. He rolled it in his good hand, rubbing it free of grit.

“Alright.” Imrael rolled his eyes. “Keep your air of mystery. You were buying me a drink, you said?” He was thinner than he had been when they arrived, eyes shadowed and cheeks hollowed by the wan light of the dying fire. Still, if his eyes were darkened they were no less warm and his smile was no less bright.

“If you wanted.” He cocked his arm back and threw. Five skips before it sank with a hollow little plonk.

“What I really want is dinner.” Imrael said it lightly but Khazri had hunted too often not to recognize the tension of a predator closing in on wary prey, careful not to startle it at the last. “And,” he went on. “I probably owe you. We’re going to be quite literally starving when we get back. Why did you let me give away all of our food?”

“I guess neither of us should make plans.”

“Hah, we’re awful. It’s a wonder we survived to adulthood.” He stopped, frowning. “Sorry, I didn’t mean-”

“It’s fine.” Khazri couldn’t stand any longer and lowered himself down onto the pebbly beach. After a moment’s hesitation Imrael joined him with an exaggerated shiver. He sat so close their shoulders bumped, hips pressed together. It would be smarter to move away, despite the chill coming off the stones, but Khazri didn’t. Instead he dropped his head to rest against Imrael’s shoulder; he was tired after all.

“Right, well we can go someplace fancy. With chandeliers and free bread. Keira can pay - she owes us plenty after this - and I’ll wear the hat.” He was still wearing it and showed no inclination to stop.

“Is this a ploy to embarrass me into buying new clothes?”

“We’ve established I am terrible at plans. And no, I like you just as well in rags and other people’s blood - if that makes you happy then so be it. But for what it’s worth I do think you’d look good in green.” He brought a hand up to ruffle Khazri’s hair. Khazri had never decided if he found that charming or annoying and settled on something in between, a resigned affection like a warm, itchy scarf.

“Maybe,” he conceded. And it was a concession, but easier than he’d feared.

“If there weren’t so many corpses lying about and if it wasn’t so fucking cold, this would be really romantic.”

That was true. The lake was beautiful in the twilight, with the murky waters dyed deep blue by the reflected sky and scattered with early stars. Beryl howled from somewhere down the beach, fierce and joyful. The cold helped to kill the smell of rot and the fire burning out behind them threw up sparks like fireflies.

Khazri turned to him. “Is this…Do we…?”

“Yes,” said Imrael.

As first kisses went it was a good one. Or maybe the lightheadedness was due to blood loss and if he was trembling when it ended, well, it was cold.

Later they would need to hike a hundred miles, half starving. Later they would force concessions from an indifferent aristocrat. Later they would have to talk about the things they’d done here and failed to do because people were dead and if they had cut a cancer from Milcom’s heart it had been the work of a butcher not a surgeon.

But right then Khazri kicked dirt over the embers of the fire feeling too warm in a way that had nothing to do with the coals or his tattered winter cloak. Maybe it was time to get a new one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter art by [Callum Stannard](http://callumstannard.com/) and I'm on tumblr in the [obvious place](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> The story's over but stay tuned for more depressing adventures with sad elves! (or check out my Silmarillion stuff for the depressing adventures of some different sad elves)


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